Solid WWII experience that needs a major patch.

User Rating: 6 | Theatre of War PC
Theatre of War has every piece that a great strategy game needs. It's not as fast as Company of Heroes of course, but it really can't be beat in the realism department. The only problem is that it really doesn't work as it is. Trying to get a tank column to drive along a road, deploy into line, and attack is an exercise in futility. The waypoint system is awful, and the ai never does what you want. Your tanks will use their machine guns against enemy armor unless you specifically tell them to use the main gun. Micromanagement of individual vehicles is necessary, but obviously that gets impossible during even a medium sized battle.

Infantry control has two problems, one minor and one major. The minor problem is that there is no cover system - your units don't hide behind trees, etc like they do in CoH. Before they work on that though, they need to fix the situation where infantry units will literally walk within 5m of each other without firing. Clicking the attack button doesn't seem to do anything; if you don't tell them to attack individual units, they'll walk right by them.

The game is also punishingly difficult, but that's mainly because your units are so stupid. If they were able to find targets without your help, things would be much better. As it stands, you'll end up restarting a battle five times to get it right.

The graphics are excellent - this is as good as a game like this should look (not every developer has THQs bottomless cash well). The sounds are all good, there just aren't enough of them. Each faction has one thing that they say, and they say it over and over and over and over again. It gets a little annoying.

It's hard to recommend this game until they patch it. It's possible to have fun here, and I personally want to like this one a lot - as I said before, all of the pieces are in place to make a perfect wargame. Until they fix the nagging AI issues though, it's just a little too much work for all but the most hardcore wargamer.