Reviewed: April 24, 2006
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Paradox Interactive
Developer
Paradox Interactive
Released: April 7, 2006
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1 / 8
ESRB: Everyone
8
7
6
10
8.1
System Requirements
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday is a stand alone expansion of the World War 2 real time strategy game from Paradox Interactive. Hearts of Iron 2 ended rather abruptly by 1946 so they let you wrap things up over a longer period by extending the end date to 1954 in Doomsday. There are also other improvements and added types of weapons and units but the game is still the same, try to win the war for whatever country you pick or help your alliances.
Doomsday adds things like advanced naval vessels, modern jet aircraft and nuclear weapons but you still have to get your technology and production up to that level before making those types of weapons and units. This is accomplished using the technology, research and production of your country in the various menus of the game board.
The map will help you place things and figure out where you want to go but you also have an Intelligence, Technology and Production page to work with. All in all you’re in charge of your country and all its outlying provinces working to help your alliance. The final goal is to win World War 2 and come out ahead at the start of the Cold War.
In Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday you can choose a leading nation like the US or Russia or you can try your luck at helping other major powers and choose a smaller country like Canada or Ireland. During play you’ll need to watch your resources and pick and choose your technology development carefully.
I’ve played a few RTS games before and they all have one thing in common, trying to control too much for one person. Doomsday does a good job in simplifying the control with your various areas but there is still a lot to worry about.
The different pages are easy to use but there is just so much that one person can do at any given time. They have included the time settings to slow and speed up the time as well as some automatic settings like automatically deploying convoys to leave you to concentrate on the areas you need to worry about more.
Battles are handled by ordering units like division or flotillas to areas or countries and telling them what type of mission they should accomplish. You can use a variety of land, sea and air based units to win battles toward your ultimate goal of gaining the most victory points by the end of the game.
You can pick your starting time along with your country or even jump around countries in the game after you save at any point. You get so much production from any one country and have to pick what things you want to research and produce in the various areas of weapons, units and other wartime objects.
You can also produce technologies and doctrines to help you fight your war efforts like assembly line production or Carrier Task Force methods. Research and production are limited by the resources your country has and the time it takes to produce things will depend on your manpower.
You have to choose how to organize your forces as well as where to deploy them during game play and this can be tricky as things do not happen exactly as they did historically. The choices you make and the corresponding results that the AI makes to your choices will not be the same as what happened in our past so you need to prepare and be ready for whatever the computer throws your way. There is also added realism in the political and diplomatic side of the game.
You get to interact with other countries diplomatically by making trade pacts, negotiating treaties and even sending spies to other countries as well as finding spies in yours. Mainly you just offer the various things like trades or send counter espionage spies to your country and Doomsday tells you if they succeeded or not. This all adds to the games final outcome of whether or not you’re successful in your buildup of nuclear weapons to start off the cold war on the top of the global food chain. That after all is the final outcome of the time period, nuclear buildup to be on top.
You can also play Doomsday with others over the Internet. Players can join multiplayer games on Valkyrienet provided by Paradox Interactive. You can also play over the Internet by hosting a game and telling others your IP address to join with you as well as playing over a local network LAN.
The various pages you play on in Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday are pretty basic graphically. The settings for play and variety of charts and menus are all laid out pretty well and easy to understand and use. During gameplay you can use small icons called counters or sprites, small animated characters. Either way you can tell who’s who by the small flags by each or when you click on countries or individual units they have all the information spelled out easily.
In this type of game there is not much in the way of graphics so it’s not much of an issue. The game is played at one resolution, 1024 x 768, so there’s not much in the way of settings. The game can be a bit overcome on the higher time settings and may flicker some when the memory is being used a lot. This happened some during play when I used the entire world at war but is not an issue during the smaller individual battles that are part of the saved games you can play.
Again just like in graphics there is not much in the way of sound here. Doomsday has a basic music score and some sound effects when battles are playing but they are pretty basic and don’t use much system resources. There are only two adjustments for sound, music and effects volume, but they are nothing more than background noise during play.
Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday is one game that you can play for a long time and have a lot of fun replaying it. You can choose from a wide variety of countries to start with and even jump to others during the game to control them. During gameplay you save the game and when you start back into the game you can pickup where you left off or can choose another country to play for.
The game starts off anywhere from January 1, 1936 to 1945 or you can jump into individual battles such as D-Day or the Battle of the Coral Sea. There are several individual battles to jump right into as well as the different time periods. You also have the mods coming out by fans using the editor and the changes you can make to regular gaming with the editor to make Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday a very good value.
Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday is a World War 2 RTS game that adds what fans wanted from the first of this sequel. Fans wanted the longer time span to increase the chance of winning and going more into the Cold War after World War 2. Adding the nuclear arms race and using more modern forces adds to the fun of this well made RTS.