Having played this Russian gang's game Blitzkrieg for years, I picked up this new version, as I always loved this period in history for the hardware.

Half-way through the tutorial I realized that indeed this game WAS Blitzkrieg, exactly so, right down to the same hot-keys!

Unfortunately, Blitzkrieg had some problems for me, which were:

- You can essentially win every scenario with 1 sniper and a long range artillery piece. The sniper crawls around calling targets and the gun fires, hides from counter-battery fire, and fires again.

- Counter-battery fire was WAY TOO annoying and deadly. Essentially, if you fire off more than 3 rounds, targetted by enemy artillery and killed before you can hook up the gun and run.

- The vehicle wrecks vanish WAY too quickly. Now, Nival explained this by saying that invisible wrecker crews were removing the debris outside of the game. That's hogwash. This game is all about micro-management, you have AMBULANCES for god's sake! They do almost NOTHING, you drive them to some hurt guys and they heal them! Great! That bandaged rifleman is going to win the war for me now!

But you don't get wreckers? It would have been awesome to have to remove the wrecks yourself, (yes, I'm a freak), that at least would have taught you this often overlooked aspect of war with tanks. Instead they just mysteriously vanish, like 2 minutes after you killed them. Ok, enough of my rant on this.

So the new game, has drastically removed the legendary status of the sniper. He now has to crawl around with two other guys (not his spotter and cover, as you'd expect, but a couple machine gunners). You can detach him, but he' still no where NEAR as nasty as his Blitzkrieg ancestor. I got picked off by an anti-tank team covering a bridge, that I didn't even SEE with my sniper. This is common in the game, btw. A nasty team of anti-tank troops just on the other side of a bridge, with macine gun support. Meaning, your going to lose troops, tanks, or a ton of artillery shells, just to cross 1 freaking bridge.

Troops are WAY more vulnerable in the game now, they get SLAUGHTERED by machine gun fire. I watched an entire platoon get massaquered by one guy in a tower. That is just silly.

Conversely, dug-in troops seem to have 3 thousand anti-tank missiles, and attacking them with a tank is really dumb.

The biggest problem with the new game though?

AMMO.

In Blitzkrieg, if you had a supply dump, you had unlimited access to ammo, all you needed was the trucks to haul it and as you advanced, your supply lines got really long and hard to protect.

Now though, they have added the questionable realism of limited ammo. You allocate ammo from your collective stores before the battle, and when you run out, and that's like 3 trips, max, filling up my SU-152 with ground-shaking shells, your OUT. You will likely not capture an enemy depot before they have also looted it dry, so now EVERY SHELL COUNTS, which really bites, considering how deadly infantry is against your tanks, and how limited sniper visibility is now, and how your only way to get across a bridge unscathed is to turn the opposite bank into the surface of the moon with a substained barrage.

So now, on top of all the OTHER annoyances with Blitzkrieg (they kept the AMBULANCES btw, o joy) they throw in Running out of AMMO! not only that, you can't fix tanks any more! You at least could fix tanks with repair crews in BK. Now, they get a few bolts tightened, that's it,
the tank is still nearly dead.

Finally, they also added GAS. Yes, your tanks burn oil now, and lots of it. You now have to micromanage gas trucks as well! Gas trucks but no wreckers still. Oh joy.

I was looking forward to flying around the jets and helicopters, but I'm three days slogging in the same starter campaign and still have not touched a single MiG. And from the looks of the 50,000 free anti-aircraft guns the computer get's each mission, I'm thinking what's the point.

I gave this a score above 5 just because it is copied from BlitzKrieg, which was an ok game, and it's fun driving the 60's hardware around.

PLEASE put out cheats, like FREE AMMO and FREE GAS. Quickly. My troops can't hold on much longer.