The Wargamer

Hearts of Iron II

There’s nothing quite as innovative in the gaming world than a small team of developers with big ideas struggling through the cut-throat game industry towards game and fortune, and there’s nothing quite like being there to witness them finally achieving a financial and creative breakthrough that will see them through the next couple of years with a wage in their pockets and an exciting project on their boards.

Hearts of Iron will be a name familiar to many wargamers, World War II buffs, and Chinese censuring officials everywhere; it was just about the only strategic level game that ever managed to pull off the Second World War in a somewhat buggy but fun and convincing manner.  The game manages to balance economics and warfare, chronicling the age in such detail as to have the pictures of countless thousands of obscure regional leaders and commanders on show alongside exhaustive descriptions of everything on offer from T-34’s to bulldozers.

Now Paradox are back with the sequel and from exhausting play testing I can already safely tell everybody in the audience that this is the one all the Hearts of Iron fans will be playing for the next couple of years. Hearts of Iron II is not so much a revolution as a refinement, taking the vast swathes of sheer detail in the first game and polishing it to near perfection with the aid of time, hindsight, and countless man hours of play and feedback from players.

From the interface down, the game has been stripped, cleaned, and reassembled, ready for firing once more - only this time the rounds will be hitting much closer to home; the basics of the game mechanics remain similar to Hearts of Iron (and indeed this is the case with just about every game from Paradox since Europa Universalis II, though I am reliably informed that the long suffering engine is finally being put to bed with Hearts of Iron II), but the nitty gritty detail has been worked on exhaustively to produce a final product that, as a couple of the members of the Paradox team remarked to me, you won’t want to go back to the original Hearts of Iron after playing.

This being a first impressions piece I won’t go too deep on the detail, which suites me fine as it means I can extol the sheer joys of the gameplay alone. The first installment of Hearts of Iron could wear on the mind after a while, and this is where after all the refinements, additions and balancing that Hearts of Iron II has really put one up on its predecessor – it’s like playing Civilization III in that I can sit down to play it for an hour in the evening and then, after what feels like half that time, look up at my clock only to discover that it’s time to get breakfast… and then decide to forego the breakfast in favour of Gotterdammerung.

I have been playing the Battle Scenarios marginally more than the Grand Campaigns during my first few days with the game, and they are a fine addition to the game indeed. Limited maps and historical scenarios using the game’s highly refined combat model allowed me to play without the worry of economic fine tuning and global domination. These scenarios’ lack of broader perspective are a trade off created with multiplayer gaming in mind. Whereas a grand campaign from 1936 – 1948 could take up to 40 hours to complete (a stretch for a multiplayer game, to say the least), a battle scenario can last from one hour to ten, and so are far more convenient for multiplayer battles and shorter sessions with the game.

They are also immensely fun to play with a wide variety covering everything from the invasion of Poland to North Africa and even a few “What if?” hypothetical scenarios such as the war spreading to South America and an invasion of the Japanese mainland minus the Atom bomb.