Armies of Armageddon: WDK 2K

DEVELOPER : Boku Strategy Games
PUBLISHER : Shrapnelgames

 

System Requirements Pentium 133, Win 95/98, 30MB HDD space, 24MB RAM, 16-bit color 800x600 res.

Recommended Pentium 200MHz, 48+ MB RAM

Ratings
Code Issues Graphics: 5 - lots of unit sprites, not really animated Sound: 5 - nice suite of weapon effects Interface: 4 - big map leaves the interface cluttered and hard to use for some functions	Play Issues Solo Play: 8 - good AI, extremely interesting and long campaign Replayability: 10 - a complete and totally functional editor lets you literally do ANYTHING. Multiplay: 5 - PBEM is supported Learning Curve: 7 - quite easy to learn the game, the interface is a little difficult.
Other/Notes Documentation 8.0 – extensive and detailed manual helps understand not only playing, but also the logic of the designers +.1 for a small publisher, +.2 for the consistently strong AI, +.5 for outstanding customer and community support, +.2 over and above the Replayability score for an amazingly flexible editor (and an AI that can cope with it). Pros: Great editor, very good AI Cons: Feels a little 'dated', interface could use improvements. Overall: 7.6

Skirmish wargaming is nothing new. In fact, one might reasonably hold that miniatures wargaming began as a skirmish wargame with H.G.Wells' penchant for tin soldiery on the living room rug. Skirmish wargames are tactical games; the figures are a 1:1 representation of their real-world counterparts. The entire premise is to represent battles at their most intimate, individual level. The scale has a definite attraction as the rules bring home the immediacy of combat, usually resulting in a tactical wargame more heart-pounding than cerebral.

Armies of Armageddon (I'll get to the "WDK 2K" part in a bit) is a computer skirmish wargame set in the future. The player (in the solo game) represents the forces trying to revivify old Earth, while desperate and unfriendly native enemies resist them.

Players move their forces, allocate shots, and resolve fire in a relatively simplistic 3 phase turn-based IGO-UGO system that is easy for even the newest gamer to understand in minutes. Opportunity fire (dedicating a unit to "waiting for something to shoot at during the other guy's turn") is available, which largely corrects the more egregious abuses of IGO-UGO systems.

Units hit based on their individual skill, damage depending on the damage and armor penetration of the weapons they happen to carry, and die when their health is expended.

The system itself is a rather basic one, and is taught to the player in a graduated series of programmed-instruction style scenarios, beginning with the simple tasks of aiming and firing some immobile turrets. The next scenario (for example) then gives you some mobile units, and so on until you have experience with the complex units like vehicles and personnel carriers, all the while saving the Earth from the bad guys.

The unit graphics are functional, reminding me very much of my fond memories of the original X-Com, also a similar squad-level tactical wargame. The sound is likewise good, and I especially liked the occasional commentary of the various soldiers, although it did get repetitive before I was done with the second scenario.

The controls and interface were pretty straightforward - click on the unit to activate, click on the destination to move. Right clicking brings up information on the unit or terrain. Handy reference screens show the large scale tactical view, while a small display showed the current soldier's field of view. It would have been nice if more controls had been available (I was playing at 800x600, windowed mode is available at 1024x768) on the initial screen, since some commands - changing stance from moving to cover, for example - required paging through the command buttons. Some functions were downright frustrating (the "next unit" button didn't really go through all available units all the time) and probably could have been done better. There are some things that are simply missing that would make the player's life just a little simpler - potential target indication could be clearer, and weapon range circles would have been a nice option. I did very much like that units given a longer move order would immediately stop on sighting a new enemy unit.

Gameplay itself, as mentioned above, is straightforward. This is a big advantage in AI implementation, as the enemy units maneuvered well, using cover and ganging up where possible on the player's units. It's possible the AI could use concentrated fire a little better, scattering its shots too much across your troopers where focusing their damage on a single unit would be more effective, but this is easily rationalized by the disorganized and crude nature of your opponents (the "grunts"). Further, the AI used its vehicles well - heavily armored enemy vehicles would advance directly into fire, while more mobile light enemy vehicles would race around flanks and exploit opportunities. If the AI isn't enough for you, PBEM is also supported.

As is logical, units are damaged by fire and protected by armor. Moreover though some weapons have a chance to "stun" targets, making them unable to move or fire next turn. Weapons are both of the direct- and indirect-fire varieties, as well as explosive, missile, and multi-shot weapons. Vehicles are particularly well represented, with turn and acceleration limits based on their last turn's speed; no moving maximum, then zero, then maximum again in AoA. Vehicles of all types have a speed slider that is centered on their last speed and is only changeable a finite amount - if you are driving a tank at top speed and a panicked friendly runs in front of you, you will not be able to stop. (Seriously this happened to me!) Similarly, they have a turn radius that requires X number of moves forward before a subsequent turn, forcing fast craft like speedboats and hovercraft to turn in long sweeping arcs that make you really hate cluttered maps.

One of the best features of AoA is that the soldiers are not automatons. Each soldier has a realistic "morale" stat, which will govern even the best player's ability to throw their units into tough situations. It's not intrusive, but knowing your units may panic when they see a lot of friends go down has a big effect on how you manage your forces. Speaking of that, another realistic feature of the campaign game is that units that are "killed" aren't necessarily dead. In fact, given the technological resources of the player's side, it makes sense that fully 75% of them recover for use in the next campaign scenario (although most realistically, this should drop SIGNIFICANTLY if you abandon the battlefield and/or lose the scenario).

Fog of war is a vital part of the game. Spotting is realistic (i.e. units have limited fields of view, spotting is not automatic, and the battlefield is littered with vision impairments such as smoke, fog, and poison gas) and you will immediately respect the AI a great deal when you are suddenly attacked from an area ostensibly "cleared" of the initial screen-darkening Fog of War, but not viewed by your units for some time. It's not exactly unfair, but it would have been nice to have some distinction (ala Age of Empires' semi-darkening graphic) between areas that have simply been cleared of the original Fog, and those areas that are currently under direct observation.

The manual is very extensive and complete, explaining not only how to manage the game and units, but also many useful insights into how the game does things like calculate friendly fire and aim points. This is critical information for really playing a game to its limits, and I wish more big publishers would be as open with such 'interior' detail as Boku is.

As I mentioned above, I said I'd "get to the WDK 2K part" later. This is fully half the product, and I wanted to cover it a bit in detail. WDK stands for Wargamers Development Kit and it is extensive. Absolutely everything in this game is customizable, and I mean everything. Certainly, the units themselves are editable. To the designers of AoA WDK 2K, this was too pedestrian. They also give you the ability to adjust terrain, vehicles, weapons and even the weather for a given scenario. Want to design a submachine gun that shoots fire and grenades? Sure. Give it a graphic that makes it look like a laser firing, with big explosions at the target? No problem. Change what the icon looks like? Not difficult at all. Alter the color them of your forces? Yup. A full map editor is also included of course, with terrain for wilderness to spaceships.

Boku and Shrapnelgames are clearly at the forefront when it comes to customer satisfaction with their products. WDK2k itself is an evolution of the previous WDK title driven by fan requests and commentary. To this end, Shrapnelgames is offering any owner of the previous WDK a free upgrade to WDK2K. This may not, at first blush, sound like that much of a deal, right? But think on it. WDK was sold by Battlefront.com; Shrapnelgames is in effect GIVING away its product (since it didn't make a single dime from the original purchases via Battlefront.com) simply because Boku and Shrapnelgames think "it's the right thing to do." That's stunning. I cannot imagine a large publisher or developer making such a positive and gamer-friendly decision. Likewise, they continue to support the game and community strongly - for example, Richard Arneson of Shrapnelgames has advised that mod packs will probably become available for a reasonable sum as time goes by. Basically, their opinion is that if a fan commits the time and effort to create an entire modification and it meets their quality expectations, they'll help that fan make a little back by selling the mod via the AoA official channels. They should be highly commended, and financially rewarded, for these sorts of choices.

I liked playing AoA. Certainly, it's a game that doesn't have the glitz-factor of the latest crop of RTS or big-studio strategy games. But it's a solid tactical 'skirmish' wargame that provides a great deal of entertainment for the bucks. The campaign game is solid, while the unit carryover and increasing strength of what you're facing supplies a good level of suspense. And the editor is really great. Boku has opened up the guts of the game to the player and, while I expect it's possible for you to create something that the AI just can't figure out (or worse, breaks the scenario unless you remove it) I wasn't able to. I appreciate that level of respect from a game designer. With Armies of Armageddon WDK 2K, they've handed us the keys to the 'good' car!

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Reviewed by Steve Lieb