Theatre of War 2 Sucks

[CaptHawkeye]

Playing these games is like playing Jutland on acid. They're slow, boring, clunky games that I would still find a way to like if it wasn't for the fact that Africa, Centauro, Kursk, and even Caen have all been released and have shown no progression or improvement from beginning to end of the development cycle.

The user interface is terrible and the manual tells you nothing. The game labels commands but all of the game's commands have more to them then they let on. Their are lot of niche aspects about the game the developers obviously couldn't be assed to explain in a useful manner.

I love the way the tanks, artillery, and airplanes are designed into the game which makes it such a fucking cockslap that infantry are so useless. They don't seek cover automatically, so it's routine for a whole squad to get murdered instantly. Spreading them out only isolated them from eachother because the pathing is totally fucked and a squad won't support itself unless you tell every man to move exactly where you want him to. A lot of units are totally useless by design. Combat Engineers have no special abilities to remove or place mines, trenches, traps, etc. Some units are just fucking weird. You can move mortar teams but machine gun teams are considered a "static". Why?

The game has no re-enforcement system beyond scripting so I hope you like saving every minute. Because total force annihilation will happen to you, a lot, for bullshit reasons.

The campaigns are designed by monkeys. Every mission pits your tiny force against ridiculously one sided odds and then leaves you no recourse at all. You could lose a mission in the first 2 minutes and have no way to recover meaning the missions and units by design are inflexible making the game unintuitive. If you don't play the way it wants you to, then you shouldn't play at all.

Look, I love paced realistic games but you'd think it would be clear by now that going for 100% realism results in a crap game that even simhards can't like because it's just unplayable. The balance is weird, the design is linear and boring, the realism is frequently anything but, and the games suffer from slowdown and random CTDs.

It's too bad because I really liked Theatre of War 1.

[weemadando]

It always bums me out when designers fall back on: "LOL! UNDEFEATABLE ODDS!" as a "difficulty" mechanic.

[Artemas]

Some of the Men of War missions were bad like that. "Here are 6 guys with pistols. Clear that village, and the 200 germans and 12 tanks inside it."

When it got to the larger scale missions, that problem disappeared for the most part, due to effective starting forces and reinforcements.

Was Theatre of War very different from the sequel? Or is it just a case of not fixing any of the crippling problems the first one had, and just not improving things generally.

[Vympel]

I remember playing the demo for the first game and finding the experience tedious, so I thought fuck these games. Too bad, it could've been good. Combat Mission = more fun.

[CaptHawkeye]

CM Shock Force has serious design problems of its own but at least it's balanced, playable, and ultimately fun a lot of the time. They're about to come out with CM: Normandy anyway and they intend to have more WW2 themed releases after it.

I got all of ToW 2 just because it was on Steam Sale for like $5.00 between Africa and all the expansions. They're not worth full price.

It always bums me out when designers fall back on: "LOL! UNDEFEATABLE ODDS!" as a "difficulty" mechanic.

That would imply they were in control of their own design process. Everything indicates they basically didn't care and just threw some units and objectives together on a multiplayer map. They made an engine but didn't want to actually go about making the "game" part.

[CaptHawkeye]

"We know you lost every one of the tanks in your force to track hits at 1 km from the American battle line, but we need you to hold the town against a huge wave of American armour coming to take it back."

My "re enforcements" consisted of a force of 3 Tigers and 3 Infantry squads under AI control. The infantry then proceeded to just stand there and do nothing while all 3 Tigers got de-gunned by fucking LEEs at 1300 meters. Woah realistic game man.