Axis & Allies Updated Hands-On

While there have been many real-time strategy games based on World War II, Atari and TimeGate Studios are looking to shake up the genre with Axis & Allies. While most real-time strategy games make you gather tons of resources, build expansive bases, and then swamp the enemy with sheer numbers, Axis & Allies borrows more than a few ideas from TimeGate's innovative Kohan and Kohan II real-time strategy games. The results are very promising, judging from a preview version of the game that we've been playing.

Axis & Allies features several different gameplay modes. There's a campaign game that allows you to play a series of missions as any of the major powers, including the United States, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Then there's a custom game mode, which lets you set up a battle on a randomly generated map. The third and final mode, simply called World War II, resembles the famous Axis & Allies board game, though the PC game isn't associated with that. World War II has two parts: first, there's a turn-based campaign map, where you move armies around a map of the world, sort of like a giant game of Risk. Then there are the real-time strategy battles that occur when two opposing armies meet. The number of units that you have in each province during the turn-based phase will affect the forces at your disposal during the real-time strategy phase. If you only have a defensive army, then you'll be limited to infantry regiments. But if you move a tank division into the province, you'll have access to armor regiments during a battle. Whoever wins the battle will win control of the province.

The developers at TimeGate have modified the excellent gameplay mechanics found in the original Kohan games and the recently released Kohan II: Kings of War to fit into the World War II setting of Axis & Allies. For example, you do not build individual units, but rather you build regiments of them. A regiment is a group of units tied together; a tank regiment consists of four to five tanks, while an infantry regiment has up to nine guys in it. So instead of having to click on dozens of different units, you only need to select a few regiments and throw them into the fight. Moreover, a regiment is not destroyed until every unit is completely wiped out, which means that a badly mauled regiment can be restored back to its full strength if you can get it back into supply (more on that later). Regiments can gain experience, so a veteran regiment is a lot tougher than a green regiment. It's therefore in your interest to try and preserve your regiments rather than throw them away in a fight. This leads to many back-and-forth battles in Axis & Allies, as exhausted attackers will suddenly try and fall back while the defenders can then press forward and take the advantage.

There are no resources on the battlefield, so you won't send soldiers to mine ore. But there are three key resources in the game: money, ammunition, and oil. You earn money by conquering and securing towns and cities; the more cities you hold, the greater your income. Money is used for everything in the game, from buying new regiments to researching new technologies. Money will also help you cover any deficits that you have in terms of ammunition and oil. You don't actually gather these resources, but you build oil and ammo depots that will give you a positive flow of each resource. Each regiment that you build will have a negative affect on that flow, as it represents the logistical burden that the regiments have on your supply.

Speaking of which, supply is another crucial factor in the game. Your base has a supply radius around it, which means that any regiments within that radius can reconstitute back to full strength. However, if your regiments are beyond your supply radius, they can't recover from losses. So an important goal in Axis & Allies is to build a supply chain--consisting of a series of supply depots linked to each other--so your units don't have to constantly retreat all the way back to base to heal. Of course, the longer your supply chain, the more vulnerable it is to being cut off. To reflect the fluid nature of World War II warfare, all of your structures are mobile--they can be packed up and moved via truck to another location. This means that you can keep moving supply depots forward during an offensive, and then pull them back when you're on the defensive.

You can choose to play as one of the major military leaders of the war, such as Eisenhower, Zhukov, Patton, and Rommel. Each military leader has special bonuses that can come into play, assuming that you can afford them. For example, playing as Nimitz will give you access to the atomic bomb, which you can drop on an enemy base to cause devastation, though you'll need to amass a fair amount of money in order to use it. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence opponents will also have their own military leaders, which will not only affect the bonuses that the AI receives, but also will define their tactics; for example, the Patton AI is as aggressive as you'd expect. TimeGate promises a non-cheating AI, which means that the AI will play by the same rules you do, and from our experience, it's as formidable as the AI found in Kohan II. In particular, if you're not careful in a custom battle, the AI can and will clean your clock.

Graphically, Axis & Allies looks quite good, and the near-complete version that we played had progressed quite a bit even from the earlier beta. The entire game is rendered in full 3D, and vehicles and buildings feature a nice amount of detail. Then there are little graphical effects, like watching tanks knock down trees and seeing planes go down in flames. Each divisional headquarters you build is based on an actual unit that fought during the war, which is a nice touch. So each division has its own unique unit badge, and each regiment attached to that division carries that badge. It's a cool effect that lends the game historical flavor, and it also helps you to identify regiments on the battlefield.

It has already been a really strong season for strategy games, and it's not over yet if Axis & Allies is any indication. By taking the innovative gameplay mechanics of Kohan and transplanting them to the familiar World War II setting, Atari and TimeGate look like they have a promising game on their hands. Axis & Allies is in the final stages of development, and it will ship later this year.