Steel Division 2
An RTS for discerning armchair generals
Agrandiose rendering of World War II’s Eastern Front, Steel Division 2 details Operation Bagration, the Red Army’s back-breaking push against the Nazi war machine. It’s an ambitious real-time strategy game, and though it ultimately fails to live up to a lot of that ambition – especially with its singleplayer campaign – the vastness of its battles captures the scale of total war with lavish detail.
Tactical battles are the heart of the game, real-time conflicts pitting dozens of units against each other in conflicts that feel real. Battles with ten players on each team, each commanding a couple dozen units, feature prominently in online play and take place on a map so big you couldn’t hope to support your furthest ally if you wanted to. It’s warfare at a scale that inspires awe when you watch a replay.
TAKE COMMAND
Steel Division 2 pushes realism as far as it can be pushed in the genre and still remain fun – a tank’s main gun can fire massive distances, up to 2,000 metres, and even that kind of range doesn’t scratch the width of a map. A multiple-rocket artillery piece can take minutes to reload. Infantry can fight for so long in urban warfare that they run completely dry of their thousands of rounds of ammunition, requiring you to bring in supply trucks with the next wave of reinforcements. SD2’s tactical play forces you to care about details like force composition and deployment speed and how terrain affects the battlefield. Not in boring, simple ways like light cover or heavy cover, but on a human scale that shapes the world your units move in. Two kilometres is a huge distance to ask your soldiers to charge on foot with people shooting at them. It’s not a huge distance for the tank gun taking aim at your men.
Matches are won or lost on the frontline of combat, a coloured line overlaying the field that pushes and pulls as units move. It’s satisfying to shift, forming dynamic pockets and bulges and salients. New to SD2 are capture points, so battles are won by taking notable terrain features: hilltops, bridges, towns, roads. It’s
It’s warfare at a scale that inspires awe when you watch a replay.
a marked improvement from the simple percentage of map control in Normandy 44. Interacting with that terrain is simple. The game’s built-in range and line of sight checking tool is well made – it’s hotkeyed to
C – and sliding across the terrain to reveal high ground for overwatch or sheltered dells to advance along is a joy. Battles take place over three phases, A, B, and C, each of which escalates the fight, introduces new units, and changes your income of points to call in those units with.
All of this is quite complex. There are systems for suppression, morale, armour penetration, resupply, repair, surrenders, shock, air combat, cover, and transports, and that isn’t an exhaustive list. In an unforgivable sin, there is neither tutorial nor manual to help you learn the basics of the game. The UI is also woefully unequipped to direct you. How much fuel does this particular plane have left? Who are my soldiers shooting at? These are not things it will tell you at a glance.
One would hope that this fidelity would apply to Army General, the much-hyped singleplayer campaign that scraps Normandy 44’s scripted scenarios for a full-on strategic wargame. The sprawling Army General maps are a war table hundreds of kilometres square, each recreating a particular section of Operation Bagration. You’re given basic objectives and a historical layout of battalions to move about in turnbased rounds with your opponent. When you clash, you bring some of those battalions into SD2 skirmishes. This sounds excellent, a partnership of real-time tactics and turn-based strategy. It is anything but.
INFURIATING INTERFACE
Army General suffers from a frustrating, terrible interface and poorly-explained, poorly-suited mechanics. Notably, it does have a manual, but one so vague as to be unhelpful. Units are moved around the map and attack via an action points system, but that system can be baffling to understand because it’s married to real-world measurements in kilometres and an invisible grid overlay, with no indication as to why a battalion can’t attack enemies or why it’s moving so slowly even though you’re sure it’s on that road and not in the adjacent swamp.
The Army General mechanics even manage to throw off the tactical battles. Deployment phases are thrown out the window in favour of phases based on the position of the battalions on the map. So sometimes you’re stuck with no tanks, or no infantry, for half a fight. It’s a bizarre choice for a game that otherwise prides itself on realism. Why would the recon group charge the German bunker line rather than wait 20 minutes for the tanks to show up?
Despite the campaign’s shortcomings, the multiplayer and skirmish warfare are still excellent. They feature some great innovations on Normandy 44. Command networks let you link your leaders with a high-ranking officer for greater bonuses to those under their command.
Steel Division 2 is a good game buried under layers of frustrating obfuscation and burdened with a poor singleplayer experience. Every time I was close to getting fully immersed, the game reared up a new, ugly problem.