Grab The Games: The Campaign Series: Fall Weiss

The Campaign Series: Fall Weiss is the first game from what can hopefully become a series of detailed wargames spanning all the important campaigns of WW2. Wasteland Interactive, its developers are at the moment hard at work at Worlds of Magic, but assured me that they are planning to continue with the series. And it would be a sad thing if they didn't. Fall Weiss depicts German invasion of Poland in 1939, it is not the first game to do so, but it does stand out from the others in a few respects. Generally this conflict is seen as having two sides Germany and Poland. Most games do not depict Soviet Union's involvement in it (and that's rather logical, it started 17 days after Germany's invasion and Poland was not able to offer any meaningful resistance there). Fall Weiss includes Soviet Union as one of the major players. This is a bit ahistorical, but offers very interesting possibilities, e.g. a clash between Germany and SU in 1939... the addition of one more player to what seems like a two-player game is very refreshing. But you can even go beyond that, Fall Weiss uses the same engine as other Wasteland Interactive WW2 games, and here too you can go into advanced options... So you want to play the Fall Weiss campaign as Denmark? Pretty pointless, but yes, you can do that. Any country found on the map is playable (and you can play more than one also, so if you want to play out some strange alliance between Poland and SU it is possible.

The New Game screen gives you a choice between 3 sides of the conflict and 3 what-if options.

The game itself is played out on a very detailed map, while most of the action takes place on the territory of Poland it does span enough area in all the other directions to give place for unexpected developments. Like all the other WI games, this one is pretty moddable, by default you can play with units depicted as figures or NATO counters (but if you own e.g. Time of Fury adapting others should be easy) and two map modes. Those incline to modding will surely add more. At first glance the game may seem similar to Panzer General and its descendants, and if you are thinking of the ease of play yes it does. But contrary to Panzer General, units can work together and this makes a huge difference. By clicking on the target and then clicking on units around you select which units will take part in combat. Defenders get big modifiers because of terrain, entrenchment and etc (although you can lower them by air bombardment) so attacking with more units is crucial. But even getting 5-1 odds does not usually allow to destroy the enemy, this can be effectively done by encirclement, so manoeuvring is very important. And the AI understands that, it is both able to encircle your units and to pull away its units to a better position. It doesn't do anything very clever strategically, but is very competent on a tactical level.

Even with this advantage the forest means the defenders will hold out.

Coming back to the easiness I mentioned before the game does one original and both brilliant and terrible thing. Instead of displaying the strength of a unit as a number that shows the number of people/equipment, it displays its effective strength. So you do not have to take into account the technology, command bonuses etc etc. What you see is the final number, the effective strength. That's brilliant, but at the same time it can be confusing at times, an out of supply unit that displays strength of 2, manages to escape your grasp and suddenly it is seen as 20. Also at the glance on the map it is not that clear which units need reinforcement. So this system has both its pros and cons, but is good to see that the devs try to go beyond the tried and tested of wargaming.

The game has seamless zoom and if you zoom out far enough the units become country symbols, easy to see at a distance.

I have not run into any bugs in the current version (1.10) but there are areas that need more polish, e.g. there is one button with a missing tooltip, and after starting the game in the simple mode, loading a save shows you all the settings of an advanced mode (which can be a little intimidating to some). The scale of the game means you have under your control hundreds of units conducting few separate smaller operations, so it is a true wargame that requires some thinking. Still, playing as Germany you really can't lose (but it is possible to have local defeats and setbacks) so it is a very good learning exercise before you try playing as Poland or SU which offer more of a challenge. Personally I find this game the best of all WI games so far, probably because I dislike their naval system, which here doesn't matter, but also because it shows how much fun we can have with a conflict that looks pretty straightforward, if given enough freedom. I can recommend this game to those who like classic wargames or would like to see why most games called strategy games truly do not deserve the name. :)

Mikolaj W