Reviewed: November 11, 2002
Reviewed by: Richard Cross
Publisher
CDV Software
Developer
FireGlow Games
Released: September 17, 2002
Genre: Strategy
Players: 8
ESRB: Everyone
8
7
7
9
8.3
System Requirements
Recommended System
Wow, I couldn’t believe that a year had gone by since I had written my review for the add-on to the original Sudden Strike game, Sudden Strike Forever. When I was asked if I was interested in reviewing the newest game released from CDV and Fireglow, Sudden Strike 2, I jumped at the chance. Although the original Sudden Strike game wasn’t a record breaker in sales and it didn’t have all of the bells and whistles that the Red Alert series had going for it, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it because it had somewhat of a different twist to its story line and the units were real world military units. Needless to say, I was very excited about getting the sequel.
Once I started playing Sudden Strike 2, I couldn’t help but notice some of the new features that had been listed on the box. Fireglow has added close to fifty new units which brings the total unit count to nearly one-hundred and fifty! Of course you may not get every unit imaginable for every scenario, but here are just some of the units that you can command: snipers, machine gunners, grenadiers, bazooka gunners, commando troops, officers, AT and AA guns, howitzers, rocket launchers, and many, many more.
Sudden Strike 2 is an RTS game based on the World War II era. You can play as one of five great nations: Germans, Russians, British, Japanese, and the Americans. The game includes five campaigns with over forty missions and uses the traditional top-down view so that you can see your units on the battlefield. You also have the ability to select one of four different difficulty levels. I chose the lowest difficulty level because I remembered how difficult it was to play the original game, and Sudden Strike 2 is no easier. The enemy AI is now intelligent enough to hide in buildings and take cover when being fired upon.
One of the nicest features that Sudden Strike 2 has to offer is its realistic units and its strategy element. For instance, many of you have heard of the "tank rush" in the Red Alert series. The "tank rush" allows you to overrun the enemy with tanks and take very few casualties. Well, within Sudden Strike 2 if you were to try a "tank rush" and not use any strategy, your tanks would end up a melted mess of molten steel.
The realism within this game is another great feature. In one of the scenarios you have to rush a beach and take out the enemy forces. To do this you must first take out the enemy drivers and then take over the enemies vehicles. In doing this, I selected the machine gunner troops instead of using my snipers, and my force of 20 to 30 machine gunners bit the dust. It is almost impossible to take out enemy armor with just infantry forces. However, if you happen to have some bazooka gunners within that group then you may be able to destroy the enemy armor and save some of your infantry units.
You have to play smart to win this game, you just can’t charge in with the hopes to wipe out the enemy without any resistance. The fog of war that covers the battlefield is one of the best implementations that I have seen in a game of this type. If you try to just drive your tanks into the nearest enemy town, the enemy howitzers will take them out so quickly it will make your head spin. In the event that you do happen to try this, you will most likely be tempted to restart the mission because you thought it would be easier than this!
While I have written about some of the gameplay in the previous paragraph, there is much more to write about here, including some good and bad points of the game. To begin, let’s talk about some more of the good points. Besides having infantry units and stationary artillery units in the game, you also get the option of controlling armored units, troop transport vehicles, supply trucks, and maintenance vehicles. One of the new things that has been added to this sequel is the ability to take out the enemy drivers in all vehicles and commandeer them with your own units and use them for the good of your nation. I enjoy taking out the enemy and using his own artillery against him.
I will usually take my tanks in very slowly at first and follow behind them with a supply truck with extra ammunition, infantry troops, and the large long-range artillery as the trailer unit. Once my tanks have taken out the enemy infantry stragglers I set up shop with my artillery and use a few infantry units to explore the map and uncover the fog of war while I target the enemy units with the long-range artillery. This does tend to take a bit longer during the campaign, but it is about the only way to keep your units alive in the process of exploring the map.
Another nice added feature of this sequel is the ability to control air units. These can consist of fighter planes and air transport units. Of course the game wouldn’t be complete without the dreaded bombers flying through the air and giving the enemy a very hot and explosive reason to run away! The game also includes ambulance vehicles so that you can heal your wounded infantry. I’ve never actually used the ambulance as most of my infantry units get blown to bits when hit with an enemy mortar shell and there just isn’t much left to heal.
I did experience one major problem when playing Sudden Strike 2. This problem actually stopped me from playing the game for about a week and a half. When I attempted to load a saved game, it would load and then suddenly crash back to the desktop. I emailed technical support and they said that my saved game file was corrupt and that I would have to find one that wasn’t corrupt and continue on from there. Well, that’s not such a bad fix if you only have one saved game file that wouldn’t load, whereas I had about half a dozen files that were supposedly corrupt. After getting the news that I would have to restart from where my saved game files were good, I decided that I needed a break and I started playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 2. Besides, I knew I had to write that review next anyways so I really didn’t mind taking a break from the killing and building my very own theme park.
So after a few days of "R&R" I was ready to get back into my own personal war versus my saved game files. I decided to look in the saved game directory and compare the file sizes of some of my saved games. To my surprise there were two files for each of my saved games. The standard .SSS saved game file, and also another file with the extension .RRS. I knew that the .SSS files were for the saved games, so I thought let’s just delete the .RRS file since I really didn’t know what that was for anyway. Low and behold, deleting the .RRS file allowed me to load and play my saved game files. I sent this information to technical support and asked them what the .RRS file was. Nine days later I received a response from technical support that the .RRS file was the replay file and that I could disable the replay recording in the options menu. The response had no explanation why this file would cause a crash to the desktop, but at least I could play my old games.
The game also had a few other annoying, but not game stopping problems. Some of the time my units wouldn’t go exactly where I wanted them to go. Basically, if I had some units that I wanted to travel north around a city, when I clicked the target area they would try to go through the city (the enemy’s stronghold) to get to their destination. Obviously this isn’t the best route and I would take numerous casualties because of the pathfinding AI. During other missions I had units that would just get lost and not go to their target destination at all. This is very frustrating when you are trying to win a war!
I assumed that the graphics would be much better since it had been over a year since the original game was released. Well, some were better, and some were not. I enjoyed playing the game at 1024x768 resolution, and at this higher resolution, you can definitely see a much larger area of the map. To my dismay, the units and terrain looked very much the same as the original Sudden Strike game. The units are very detailed when you run the game at a lower resolution, but then you are really limited to the amount of the battlefield that you can see.
Overall, the graphics add quite a bit of realism to the game. Almost everything in the game is able to be destroyed, whether you shoot it up, blast it with a tank, or obliterate it with artillery.
High-end, top-notch graphics are not the only feature a game needs to give the gamer the feeling of actually being there. This "virtual experience" can only be attained by having great graphics combined with great sound. The sound effects in Sudden Strike 2 seem to be very realistic and really add to the overall gaming experience. The ambient sounds fade in and out as you browse your way around the map. The echoing gun fire seems to come at you from all angles when you are in the heat of battle.
Sudden Strike 2 is a good value. It’s not an exceptional game, but it does have some nice features and gameplay even with its few flaws. With its five campaigns and over 40 missions combined with LAN and online multiplayer, you will be hard pressed to find time for any other game for at least a few weeks.
I would recommend that when you buy this game that you definitely try the multiplayer. Playing against other humans makes you use even more strategy to win and is a great addition to the single player game. While you must use careful planning and great strategy to beat the computer opponent, the difficulty seems to at least double when playing a human opponent.
The game also provides you with a map and mission editor so that you can spend hours creating your own maps and missions. This feature alone gives you unlimited replayability. With the gaming community creating new maps and missions you will never run out of new challenges for Sudden Strike 2.
Like any other game, Sudden Strike 2 does have its shortcomings, and is admittedly just more of the same, but overall, it is still really fun to play. I believe that the fog of war offers some exciting gameplay that other games of its type don’t offer.
If you are looking for a decent RTS offering with an authentic World War 2 theme then look no further. Sudden Strike 2 offers great action on a scale much larger than its competition and will keep engaged in heated combat for a long time to come.