Strategy Gaming Online - Reviews : 101: The Airborne in Normandy

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REVIEWS

101: The Airborne in Normandy

sgo_editors_choice.jpg (13167 bytes) DEVELOPER :
Interactive Simulations
PUBLISHER :
Empire Interactive

Requirements:
Pen. 100MHz, 16 MB of RAM

Recommend:
Pen. 233MHz, 32 MB of RAM

NOTE: Visit http://www.wargamer.com/101 for the latest 101 news, patches and updates.

I received my review copy of 101 Airborne with more than a little trepidation. Another World War II game? Let me say this - I’m a grognard from way back. I’ve played just about every WWII game out there, from card games (UP FRONT) to boardgames (ASL, et al), to computer games. I have to say I’ve never been impressed. The games typically range from a cartoonish anti-sim where realism is disparaged (ostensibly) in the name of gameplay, to overwhelming monstrosities that flat out give you so much to DO that they hope you won’t notice the total lack of AI (borscht, anyone?).

The manual looked pretty good, and due to some previously committed family engagements, I had the opportunity to read the manual extensively before play. I daresay I was encouraged. The manual was a utilitarian no-nonsense affair, organized in a programmed learning style - each stage of the pregame and game are presented as separate chapters with instructions, illustrations and diagrams where necessary. There’s a short history of the 101st Airborne in Normandy, but otherwise little fluff. The screenshots were washed-out to the point of near-uselessness, but the rest of the information presented is clear enough to make up for it.

Nonetheless, I was a little nervous as I booted the thing up. It LOOKED great, but I have been disappointed so many times before.

A quick overview of the play of the game begins at the mission screen. Here you select from one of 9 campaigns. The FAQ suggests that the playing time for the campaigns be estimated at 20-40 hours EACH. That’s not game time, folks. That’s sitting in your chair, working your proverbial butt off keeping your team together, alive and motivated to get the job done. Each campaign is randomly generated at start and, as you shall see, there is plenty of variation within campaigns that replayability is practically infinite.

Once you have your mission, you are invited to view the operational map and review operational intelligence on your objectives. Note that each mission will have 2 secondary missions that you can stumble onto by finding secret papers on a dead officer, speaking with a prisoner, etc.

Leaving the briefing room, you stand looking at your base. Typically you’ll go left to right, and begin at the barracks. Here you select the 18 soldiers who will attempt to accomplish the task you have been given. Entering either the enlisted barracks or the adjacent officers quarters, your candidates are standing around in various ‘at ease’ poses. You can click on them to get a brief bio as well as a short narrative. The short voiceover, coupled with their unique voices throughout the game give each soldier a uniqueness, an individuality surprising for a war sim. This is the start of your work - building the composition of your team. Everyone has 6 basic ratings from which are calculated a further 5 statistics, all influencing how fast they move, how well they stand up under fire or detect booby traps. Further, certain individuals have special weapons training (Bazooka, MG) or language skills (French, German) which will be invaluable if you capture prisoners or encounter some helpful Resistance agents. For those who want to skip this section, the AUTO button will build a team for you and actually does a pretty good job.

Next is the quartermaster’s shack - despite the fact that many here will also hit the AUTO button giving their troopers the US Army standard issue equipment, there are important nuances to the equipment rules. There is no doubt at this point that you are in a serious simulation, as you can equip your soldiers with cleaning patches for their weapons, compasses, and even choose between giving them K or D rations. But this is not an academic exercise. The team at Empire did their homework here. We all know that the Germans didn’t use gas in Normandy. So why not drop the gas mask and give each PFC an extra clip or two of ammo? The problem is, your soldiers don’t know what you & I know. If you take away their gas masks (or their flashlight, or personal effects) they get a little discouraged (minus to morale). Believe me - once you have played through these campaigns, starting discouraged is the last thing you want. Likewise, omit the cleaning patches and you may find gun jams at inopportune moments.

Once you’ve kitted out, troop over to the armorer’s. Again, the background work of the Empire programmers and historians shines here - the weapon inventory is excellent. From French Legere revolvers, to Bazookas, to grenades, you have an open choice of how you want to equip your team. Typically, you’ll find that standardization across the entire team is precluded due to stock shortages - you may only have 12 M1A1 carbines, for example. Do you give the other troops M3’s (a submachinegun) or maybe a sniper rifle or two? You’ll certainly have to cross a lot of countryside - is lugging a machinegun worth the loss in speed? And heck, you don’t expect to meet any tanks, so do you really need a bazooka? (Tip: the answer to both of these last questions is YES!) Again, there is an AUTO button here which does an adequate job of giving your men weapons but only that; in my first playing I tried to go with the auto and found my men had parachuted into enemy territory fully armed but ammunition-less. Not good. My two pieces of advice for the armory: weapons loadout is simply too critical to let the computer decide. You have to know who has what too many times in the heat of combat to suddenly realize your “sniper” has the worst marksmanship of the bunch. Further, make sure some guys - especially those armed with shorter-ranged weapons (M3, M1 Thompson) - have a few smoke grenades. If you are crossing a meadow and start taking fire from a hidden MG, that might be the only thing that gets your team to some sort of cover.

After the armory, you all meet at the assembly field where you equip your troops with the weapons and ammunition you requisitioned. Again, Empire has offered the player a chance to avoid some tedium. In my opinion however, here also the choices you make are too critical for the AUTO button. A couple of equipment bags are available for surplus ammo or food that are too much for anyone to carry. Caveat, even if the bags aren’t lost during the drop your odds of finding them soon are pretty slim. Don’t count on anything you put in the bags.

Everyone loaded up? You can’t go yet. One last job awaits you. Where does everyone sit? This might sound like a sophomoric task, but it really is important - the pilots of the C47’s were just as young and scared as the paratroopers they carried. The ground fire they were taking frightened most, and they and flew either too high, too fast, or too low and a significant proportion forgot to turn on the “go” light until far after the drop zone. (Anecdotally, 2 pilots actually waited until they were over the channel, resulting in the useless drowning of two full sticks of paratroops.) Your mission will be difficult from the beginning - separate the guys with the maps and critical equipment throughout your stick so that if some get lost, you will have good odds of having at least some effectiveness on the ground. It’s entirely possible that the last guys will be shot down before jumping, and the early guys seem to have a better chance of getting separated. You have a host of unpleasant choices to make.

Once everyone is seated, you take off and watch the fate of your stick. In a series of 18 (hopefully) cut scenes, you see what happens to each of your boys. Troopers can be lost from the stick (gone for the entire scenario), separated (it’s possible to run into them later, but unlikely), or landed in trees (slight injury all the way up to dead). Taking or returning fire is also a possibility - bad news, since it means a hot landing zone. The worst however (for you as a player) are “parachute failed” or “injured on landing”. The scream of the guy as he falls will haunt you, and the sound of a breaking leg is really, really realistic. A couple of those is enough to make you hit the space bar and jump straight to the summary screen.

Make no mistake - this game can be brutal. Playing on average difficulty, my plane took heavy flak and out of 18 I landed with five (yes, 5) effectives. 5 went down with the plane, including my Captain, Sergeant, and the bazooka. 2 were lost, 3 more were separated, 1 chute failed to open (apparently Lt. DePaul was really anxious to reach the soil of his beloved France…) , and 2 seriously injured on landing.

Now you have to realize, that this has all been prelude. Once you touch the ground, the “game” actually begins!

Assuming you’ve survived to this point, the game is a top-down, turn based combat simulation. The mechanics are straightforward and fairly industry standard ala X-COM. Everyone has action points (AP’s), and spends them to complete actions, reserving AP’s for out-of-turn actions such as opportunity fire. Available actions are accessed by a simple right-click of the mouse, with multi turn actions clearly noted as “continuing” by a spinning icon in the upper left hand corner of the screen. The interface is well-designed, presenting maximum information about the health, hunger, and morale of the soldier selected. The turn sequence is rolling-initiative based, where everyone moves from highest initiative to lowest. This makes for a very fluid turn, without a notable “beginning” or “end” - you may have 2 or 3 Americans move, followed by a German, then a cow (yes, even cows get their turn!), followed by more Americans. Movement is simple: a click on the WALK or RUN icons gives the soldier a certain number of AP’s to spend for movement, it being understood that RUNNING gives you more AP’s at a cost of poorer spotting and vulnerability to fire. Potential move-to destinations are marked with dots - green meaning AP’s sufficient for aimed fire remain, yellow allowing a final snapshot, and red meaning no AP’s remain. If the character takes fire en route, the dots change to eyes where it is obvious he will still be visible to whomever shot at him, as far as he can tell.

Of course, your guys can also search, rest, trade equipment, provide first aid, etc. The one action I thought should have been included was “assist” in the sense that serious MG fire takes a second man as loader - there is no provision for this, nor for (as far as I can tell) extensive setup times for MG’s.

So, now that you’re down and have dealt with the usual German patrol or sniper in your landing area, where are you? That turns out to be a really good question. Few troopers ever hit their drop zones, and Empire faithfully puts this into the play of the game. The screen shows a small portion of the “map” you are on - and each campaign is a grid of 7 maps by 6 maps. You are hopefully on one of the 42 maps, and can orient yourself by comparing prominent landmarks on screen with those on your operational map. This is faithful to reality: if nobody in your remaining stick has a map, you can’t look at the operational one. If you are really unlucky, Empire has disclosed that there is actually one more row of maps on each side of the screen - making it 8x9. These aren’t on your operational chart. The only way you locate yourself on these is to walk around until you drift ‘into’ the operational area.

Assuming you know where you are, or even if you don’t you still have your mission to carry out. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Germans between you and that objective. Usually, your first sign that they are about is the crackle of gunfire and the injury or death of a member of your team. Full fog-of-war is in effect, and the map remains empty geography until you spot things. This is probably my only serious complaint about the game - spotting is generally pretty realistic, but in my opinion too hard. You can have three guys prone around a foxhole that you KNOW contains a German MG team, and they can be shooting your buddies on the far side of the field, but you still don’t spot them.

Similarly, they’ve made an error in omitting sound as an important element at this level of combat. When the enemy moves, you can hear them move. But nowhere is it shown where this sound is coming from. When the scale is 6’ per space and sighting is so carefully modeled sounds become crucial.

Typically, you take fire and immediately spread out your team to cover. Moving carefully and slowly among the hedgerows, you leapfrog your guys around until they spot the enemy. Hopefully, before he spots them.

In a small concession to game play, the program notifies you when a map is cleared of enemy troops by making available the “group move” icon - allowing you to move everyone at once for a commensurate cost in time. However, it’s not a bad idea to disregard this unless you are under some time pressure, as this only reports the status of enemy soldiers. The map could still contain equipment bags, soldiers from other sticks (that will join you) or French Resistance fighters giving you important information.

Fire is handled as usual for these types of games, with the cursor changing to a yellow crosshair, turning red when you are over a (sighted) target. A nice feature is the ability to reconnaissance by fire - that is, to fire into any area without a visible target. I’ve had some success with machine guns doing this. If you narrow down an enemy position to two or three squares, having an MG hammer those squares while your other troops flank the spot can sometimes result in a cry of “Ich bin verletzt!” and a body flopping out of the bushes.

I do have a gripe about grenades - they have an explosion and do serious damage, but there are other effects that make them devastating. I had trouble getting to one heavily armed German, so I low crawled to the opposite side of his hedgerow and lobbed a grenade at him. The blast blew him over the hedgerow landing next to the grenade tosser, whom he promptly shot! This is pretty rare, but points to something important: the blast of a grenade also has a stunning effect which can incapacitate surviving troops for some time. This doesn’t appear to be simulated.

Beyond that, there’s not much more of the game play to be described. Once you reach your objective (assuming you recognize it) typically the combat becomes much more intense. Instead of a lone sniper here or a MG team there, you can run into serious defenses with interlocking fields of fire, heavy guns, mortar or artillery attacks, and even tanks. This will demand resourcefulness and not a little luck from even the best commanders. If you complete your mission, your orders are simply to Neutralize Enemy. By this time, you will also probably have picked up a secondary mission or two to try to complete. The game ends automatically after 3 game “days” when your performance is measured against that of the actual 101st.

Overall the AI is pretty tough. From random events which seem realistically applied, to the behavior of the enemy, I didn’t notice anything that seemed out of place or unbelievable. The German snipers can be positively devastating, and their threat turns every open field into something to be feared.

Graphically, the game is beautiful - SVGA and 24 bit color are coupled with better-than-average background sounds and the occasional voice comment from your troops to make the game totally immerse. Players on faster machines will want to toggle F4 for faster soldier animations.

One point struck me as I was describing this game to a friend (and I’ve been pimping it to everyone) - part of the deep sense of realism is that for the most part you are rarely confronted with statistics. Certainly, the heart of any simulation is accuracy and you can be sure that the hard numbers are in there (the weapons stats tables fill the latter 13 pages of the not-oversized 60-some page manual) but they aren’t in your face. Sure, you can find the Toughness score of your crack corporal, but in the game, you are simply told how well he feels in a relative sense. Is he hurt? Is he badly hurt? You can check his wound status by simply accessing the info screen - the wound is graphically represented there. A hurt leg? You’ll see a bandage on his leg, with the concomitant torn and bloody pants. Head wound? You’ll see it. The wound modeling is some of the most detailed programming in the game. You see pictures, you hear voices. These really start to feel like people, not empty stats. This was a subtle effect: no numbers puts this game that much closer to forcing YOU to make decisions based on the same input you would have in real life. There are not many other games that have drawn me so deeply into feeling for the characters.

The verisimilitude, the clear info layout, smooth game play, the accuracy in weapons, wounds, and equipment - Empire seems to have covered everything. Notwithstanding the small problems mentioned above, this is an awesome product. They’ve put together an authentic simulation in a beautiful package. Somehow they managed to combine serious reality with playability.

I’m curious that the manual clearly states in several places that this game is not endorsed or sponsored by the 101st Airborne Division. I wonder why? This is clearly a product to be proud of. If they couldn’t get the current 101st, maybe they should have tried the 101st veterans groups. I’ve seen few simulations that do the soldiers such justice as this. There is no other title on the market that can give you such a sense of what these men went through. That’s the highest commendation I can give a simulation. My hat is off to the team at Empire Interactive. This is a great game.

Reviewed by Steve Lieb

Summary
Pros: Absolutely immerse. Gameplay intuitive. Interface clear, informative and unobtrusive. Cons: Very little. Spotting a little too hard, and no recognition to the importance of audio clues.
Interface : 9	Gameplay : 9	Graphics : 9
Audio : 10	Multiplayer : Unrated*	Overall : 9.6

* I couldn’t find anyone to play against, although I expect it to be excellent. The multiplayer requires the entry of an IP address - a little clumsy by today’s Gamespy autopolling standard. Typically, I much prefer to play against humans. AI rarely offers a significant and repayable challenge. But with this title, I honestly don’t care if I play against a human - this is too much fun already!