World War II is a very popular setting for games these days, from first-person shooters like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Battlefield 1942, to mods like Day of Defeat, to adventure games like Prisoner of War. However, with the exception of one of Empire Earth's 14 epochs, Russian developer Fireglow's Sudden Strike games are the only traditional real-time strategy games with a World War II setting. So it's all the more disappointing that Sudden Strike II has all the weaknesses of its predecessor with only a few improvements.

The new Japanese campaign introduces South Pacific terrain.

Although the Sudden Strike games play like traditional real-time strategy games, they depart from the standard RTS formula in a couple of important ways. Like in Bungie's Myth series, there's no building or economic management, so you're free to concentrate solely on battle tactics. Some scenarios are scripted to provide reinforcements as you play, but you're usually dealing with a fixed number of units in your effort to accomplish your objectives. Another important difference is that historical vehicles are modeled, so instead of broad definitions like light, medium, and heavy tanks, you have very specific units like PzIII Type Gs and M4A4 Sherman Vs. There are artillery units of different caliber, various antitank guns, transport trucks, jeeps, and even motorcycles for reconnaissance. There are at least a dozen different types of infantry, some with special abilities like healing, laying mines, or extending your line of sight with binoculars. In addition, Sudden Strike II has a few features that seem conventional to real-time strategy games, even though they're completely unrealistic, such as the hospital trucks that heal your infantry and repair trucks that repair and rearm your vehicles.

The first Sudden Strike title had a number of historical trappings, but it didn't go very far toward encouraging historical use of them. A bunch of riflemen could chip away at a Tiger tank's hit points until it blew up. But this time, the developer made more of an effort to model realistic factors like armor penetration (those riflemen won't have as much luck against Tiger tanks this time around), morale (it fluctuates between a bonus or a penalty to unit combat values, depending on the situation), and line of sight (the game has fairly complex rules about range and facing, depending on factors like whether a tank is buttoned up, whether an infantrymen is prone, and on which floor of a building a soldier is standing).

Use recon aircraft to scout for the enemy.

Unfortunately, Sudden Strike II doesn't fix many of the problems from the first game. The interface puts an emphasis on showing as much of the map as possible at all times. This would be an admirable goal if it didn't mean sacrificing important information. There's no indication of a unit's range, firepower, or armor. You have no way of telling which units are more powerful than others. It's bad enough if you don't already know a Sherman from a Pershing, but even a World War II hardware buff will have to simply guess at the difference between a Texas rifleman and a British gunner. When you drag-select a group of units, there's no indication of who is in your group, so you'll often send vulnerable units such as trucks, medics, engineers, and officers directly into combat by accident. In fact, the only way to find out which unit you've selected is to hover the cursor over it. This is bad enough with moving vehicles, but it's next to impossible trying to pick out a 10-pixel infantryman running among trees. Since infantrymen are so difficult to tell apart from each other, you'll spend a lot of time sorting them out with your cursor and assigning them to groups. This is all ultimately futile, since the pace of combat is such that by the time you realize your men have come under fire, they're dropping like flies faster than you can tell them to go prone, scatter, or take cover.