Reviewed: November 6, 2005
Reviewed by: John Bowlin

Publisher
2K Games

Developer
PopTop Software

Released: October 18, 2005
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen

7
6
5
6
6.5

System Requirements

Shattered Union was developed by veteran strategy developer PopTop Software, the developers also responsible for Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3, and Tropico 1 & 2. Shattered Union has a over-all strategic level game where you have to fight for control of various territories on the map of the United States, as well as a more tactical-based level when actually fighting in one of the territories.

The premise of Shattered Union is that there was a very close election and an unpopular candidate was elected by congress. Civil unrest was at an all time high, with rioting in many cities. The country was also under attack by terrorism. Then the bomb hits. A nuclear device is detonated in the nation's capitol, killing off the president and almost all of the federal government. The federal government collapses. States form up into their own coalitions. The European Union sends in peacekeeping troops to try and regain order. Civil war is in full force.

The Confederacy controls the southeast states of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The European Union setup a beachhead controlling Maryland, Delaware, Parts of Virginia, West Virginia, and New Jersey. The New England Alliance is made up of New York, parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

Of course, this is only at the start of the game, since after the war starts different regions will change hands as different factions take control of neighboring lands. Russia also plays a role in the game, which is revealed through news footage cutscenes during the game.

There are three modes of play. Campaign mode is the "meat" of the single player experience. This is where you choose one of the seven factions and fight on the US map to control every territory. The campaign supports easy, medium, and hard difficulties, but I found that due to the lack of any type of intelligence data on the different sides, that the campaign mode is very hard to win unless you get lucky at the beginning, even on the easy setting. This is because you only get a certain fixed number of units and can never exceed that maximum amount, and whatever units you commit to making an attack you cannot then use to defend when your own territories are attacked.

You can also play the game in Skirmish mode, which I found to be much more enjoyable, but ultimately not very satisfying. In this mode you set up whatever pre-battle conditions you want, on whatever map you want, with whichever factions you want. Then you duke it out using the game's tactical-level combat engine. Skirmish mode is essentially playing out one single battle of the campaign mode. It is a good way to get accustomed to how each of the units work and how the main battle system of the game works.

The final mode, Multiplayer, lets you play a skirmish mode battle against another player either over the LAN, over GameSpy, or using Hot-Seat on the same PC. There doesn't appear to be any way to play out the campaign strategic level game against a human opponent.

The types of units do not vary much between the different factions although each side does have a few different names and graphics for some of the units, but they don't play any differently in practice. You can use most of the familiar modern military units, like Apache helicopters, Hum-Vee squads, Abrams battle tanks, etc. There are a bunch of different units for each main category of helicopters, fighters, bombers, infantry, anti-air, artillery, and light, medium, and heavy armor. There are no sea units in the game and air units have a limited role (except for the helicopters) especially considering their expense compared to other units.

Each faction also has different special abilities they can do that varies based on the faction and also based on the popularity level (lets call is good vs. evil). If you're really "evil" you can do some nasty attacks that do major collateral damage, while if you're "good" you can do some very precise type special abilities that minimize collateral damage.

The main battle mode of the game is pretty well designed. It plays out on a fairly realistic 3D map of the territory you are in that is divided into hexes. Each unit can occupy a hex (and only one unit). When you select a unit, all hexes that the selected unit can move into will show up in yellow. You can move through friendly units. Terrain has an impact on how far you can move as well as the unit's stats. You also have to consider fuel usage, since units can only go so far before they run out of fuel. Units can re-supply, regaining their hit points and fuel by doing nothing during a turn when no enemies are present. If a unit re-supplies in a city it works much faster.

Each unit has different levels of attack power against certain types of units. Some units are good against infantry, some against armor, and some against air. Some units are pretty weak against all of the above but they cost less and maybe if they are a vehicle travel pretty quickly and have good range. Each unit also has a certain range of hexes in visibility, and fog of war will prevent you from seeing into hexes that you have no units nearby.

On your turn, you can move all of your units, and each unit can make one attack. You can move and then attack or vice versa or move, attack, and finish moving (for each unit). When you attack an enemy unit, if that unit is not destroyed by your attack, it can make a counter attack. However, any unit can only make a single counter attack per turn, so if you attack with a second unit on the same enemy it can not make a second counter attack. This has a pretty major impact on the way the game plays out, and positioning your units is also important so that you can protect your vulnerable units with more powerful ones.

Overall the campaign strategic level of the game felt pretty contrived and tacked on, and was pretty unexciting, while the "skirmish" battle mode portion of the game was pretty exciting and fun. The game would have been better if you could do some recon on the strategic level to find out what type of opposition you could expect before making an attack into an enemy territory. Having to blindly choose an army and then attack as well as having those units "out" for the rest of the turn made for a pretty frustrating campaign mode. Also I felt like the money you get for each turn was pretty insignificant, and more money should come in on each turn, so that you can replace some of the more expensive (and more fun) units.

It seemed that there was no strategy to the AI on the strategic level, each side seemed to attack randomly. There are no diplomacy options so you can't even make an alliance with another weaker faction to defend against a bigger aggressor. This led to the situation where one big faction would be sitting there watching two neighboring smaller factions destroy each other and then it came in to clean up. The AI in the tactical battle map mode varies (you can set the difficulty) but it seemed to be fairly well done, and challenging enough not to be boring.

Where the graphics engine starts to actually show a bit of promise is during the tactical battle mode. In this mode you can zoom all the way out to see the entire map or zoom back in all the way down to showing the detail on individual units. The game will automatically take control of the camera during an attack to show an animation of rockets, bullets, and bombs taking out their targets with realistic explosions and of course, collateral damage. The units are not terribly well detailed but they look pretty good. The terrain itself looks realistic.

The graphics settings let you control the resolution from 640x480 up to 1280x1024. Overall the graphics are pretty serviceable but you definitely will not be awed by anything here. Think utilitarian rather than wow-factor. Most real-time strategy games that are out these days have much better quality 3D graphics. Fortunately the graphics never get in the way of the strategy, and from that standpoint they're good enough. One downside to the graphics is that they require a fairly hefty 128mb card for the minimum spec, which is a shame since this game would otherwise be a great title for the lower end gaming computer.

Sound effects for the cannon fire and vulcan machine guns and other various weaponry is very good. The explosions sound like explosions should. The game has pretty good environmental sounds. There are not really a lot of sounds to be heard in this game which concentrates more on the tactical game play rather than production values.

While Shattered Union does support a multiplayer mode which in theory would add a lot of replay value to the game, it's not very well utilized. There was no one else playing on GameSpy that I could find, so I couldn't play over the Internet. It does have LAN play so you could play against another opponent that way, or you could play against someone on the same PC using the Hot-Seat method. The fact that the multiplayer doesn't support playing through the campaign, though makes it kind of a shallow experience.

On the other hand, if you just want a quick and easy to learn turn-based battle system, similar to the Advance Wars games, Shattered Union might be right up your alley. The game has pretty weak production values and nothing is going to wow you graphically or sound-wise, but the core of the tactical map gameplay is solid and worth checking out if you're a turn-based fan. Unfortunately the lack of a solid multiplayer experience limits the replay value of this title somewhat.