A WWII RTS game that plays just like Total War.
In War Leaders you play as a world leader during WWII from Hitler to Franklin D. Rosevelt and you are in command of your entire nation from R&D, Money, Oil and other Resources, Military, Politics and Deplomancy.
There are three ways to play the single RTS battles, online battles or campaign and the single player grand campaign.
There are some issues and bugs with this game. I was getting a random crash after I would play a RTS battle and if you have several units on the battlefield at once it can slow down even on my 2.66 ghz Core 2 Duo CPU so I recommend at least a Duel Core processor to run this game smoothly.
The AI is pretty easy in battle on easy difficulty but the diplomancy is weak. You have to gain favor though to impress a nation to trade or ally with you. I found that even if I bent over backwards to please a nation of interest the AI still did not trust me or if they did they would not side with me. However, I found out that just like in the real war many nations were looked down upon even before the war simply because of their culture. I played as Japan and found it almost impossible to ally with even Nazi Germany which was real history. So diplomancy is difficult.
The other features include research which is important since you will be racing for the latest technology as they did in the real war. This takes a long time to research some techs so make sure you invest in more resources by taking over resource rich countries.
The RTS battles are simple but fun. You can assign units groups such as 1, 2, 3, etc. and organize them by type like infantry, artillary, light tanks, medium tanks, AA guns, etc. The AI seems to be smart on the battlefield and will look for the most strategic defense or offensive location. They will retreat as well if you overwelm them with more units or bombing runs. Air planes such as level bombers help you to soften up the enemey placements on the map.
Graphics are dated since the game was released in 2007 in Germany but they get the job done. The world map in full of detail and curves as the earth does. Audio and voice acting is horrible. Whom ever did the voice acting for the English language sounds like a dork - seriously. Normally this would reduce the games total score but since its easy to go to the settings menu and turn off speech in the game I found that it was a simple fix and did not distract from the overall game experience.
There is a patch out (v1.3) which is the UK version but will work for the US version as well and is recommended. There are cheats as well Alt+B will build all untis and buildings instantly. Alt+M gives you more money and Alt+O gives you oil if you run out.
Overall, War Leaders is a decent RTS game that is set apart by its innovation. That is why I gave this game a four star rating because it deserves this praise. There are bugs and bad voices in the game but nothing except the random crashing that will take away from the gameplay. If your looking for something different or are like me and have been dreaming of a WWII game that combines RTS with Grand Strategy together then War Leaders is your game.