While the classic Avalon Hill board game 'Axis & Allies' has enjoyed a number of computer game conversions throughout the years, this 2004 version from Kohan developer TimeGate Studios is the first to translate the World War II turn-based strategy for real-time play. The game features two dozen single-player scenarios in all. There are 12 missions in which players control the Allied forces, through a linear campaign that follows the history of the war. In control of the Axis powers, players faces 12 additional scenarios, which present an alternate reality in which the Allies are ultimately defeated.
In addition to the real-time play of the main campaigns, Axis & Allies also offers a 'World War' mode, which is turn-based and may be played similarly to the original board game. When forces meet on the map, battles can be resolved by the computer or in real-time play. Real-time battlegrounds are dynamically generated, based on the actual environments of the locations in which they are set on the world map.
Borrowing a few innovative concepts from the Kohan series, Axis & Allies has players controlling their troops in groups, and managing warfare from the position of a 'master strategist.' Instead of continually clicking to assign individual soldiers to attack individual targets, players assign orders to whole companies of soldiers, to conquer an entire enemy group or take over a town. Of course, real-world tactics become even more important in this kind of gameplay. Also as in the Kohan games, troops may be lead by powerful 'General' characters, who bring bonuses to the soldiers under their command and gain new powers as they successfully progress through the campaign.
Timegate Studios, responsible for the magnificent Kohan 2: Kings of War, also put out this WWII based RTS late last year. Those of you who played through Kohan 2 will likely have no trouble diving right into this title as the gameplay design is virtually identical to that of Kohan 2. Those of you who read my review of Kohan 2 will remember that I awarded it with an eight out of ten. Although the game design is basically the same, something is lost in the translation to the WWII theme. However, because the game does start off with the already excellent design decisions that powered Kohan 2, it is at least enjoyable if not a must have title.
Axis and Allies has four gameplay modes; a skirmish mode, the requisite online multiplayer mode, the campaign mode, and the WWII mode. WWII is a mode where there is a turn based strategy portion much like in Rise of Nations. There is a map of the world and you start off by selecting one of five nations (Great Britain, USA, Russia, Germany, or Japan) and your choice of general for that nation. The goal of the turn based game is to overtake Germany and Japan when playing the Allies, and to overtake any two of Great Britain, Russia, or the USA. Just like in Rise of Nations, you have army units that you can move into adjacent territories. When moving in to an unoccupied territory, you take it over. If there are enemies in that territory, you have the choice of fighting an RTS battle or of having it quickly decided by the computer. The more territories you control, the more money you generate per turn. Money can be used to upgrade your existing army, buy new units, or to buy new technologies. While having as many game modes as possible is a nice thought, in this case, as the format seems so familiar, and as there is nothing really new or unique to it, the WWII mode isn't really that interesting; a nice mode to have, but nothing really new.
The single player campaign is a series of famous battles. When playing the Allied campaign, you will jump from nation to nation's battles'. One mission that stood out in its difficulty was Operation Overlord, or D-Day. In this famous battle, you will have to take the beach and set up your base of operations before moving inland to overtake the enemy positions. With little room to set up your operations, and the enemy presence overwhelming, the level of challenge in this level was truly enjoyable. For the most part, though the introduction to each mission is a little bit sparse and the historical significance of each battle seems somewhat diluted. Unlike a game like Soldiers: Heroes of WWII, where each mission tells a story of how something happened, with a little artistic license, or some of the true simulators of WWII where historical accuracy is paramount, Axis and Allies falls a little bit flat in this regard by being somewhere in between with not quite enough of either to be interesting. While a small blurb is given about the events leading up to the battle, for the most part, each battle feels just like any other battle.
The actual management of units and the gameplay is virtually the same as Kohan 2 with things modernized to reflect the WWII era. Like in Kohan 2 there are three basic building types; building that generate units, buildings where you perform research and allow the creation of better units, and buildings that generate a resource. In Axis and Allies, all buildings are generated by your primary building, the Corp HQ. The buildings you create generate your resources for you, and the units you recruit require a certain amount of resources as upkeep. There are a maximum number of buildings you can create though, and when reaching the cap, you must be careful to manage what you have carefully at the risk of using more than you make. If you use more resources than you are generating, your monetary income will decrease and can go into a negative creation. Money is what is needed to build any buildings, to research any technologies and to create any units. To generate more money, you will need to create more Division HQs; buildings where you create units. To ensure that you are generating as much money as you can, you will need to build more resource generating buildings.
All buildings generated by the Corp HQ are first created as trucks and can be unpacked to create a fixed location. Likewise, they can be packed back into a truck in case you need to move it to a new location. Another interesting design decision was the supply flow for troops. Troops in Axis and Allies are not created individually but as a regiment consisting of a group of individual troops or vehicles. As long as there is one troop from that regiment left alive, and the regiment is in supply, the regiment will resupply back to full strength and to a full number of units. This is important because regiments can gain experience and become tougher. To be in supply though, your units must not only be within the bordered area created by your buildings, but they must also be attached to a Division HQ. Each Division HQ has a certain number of slots and attaching regiments to them simply means clicking an attach button. The regiment will fill an empty slot for that HQ, and will be able to be automatically resupplied if they are within the borders of your area. This can be an interesting point of strategy as when attacking the enemy, if you take out one of their Division HQ's, then units that were attached to that building will no longer be able to regenerate. However, regiments can be automatically reattached to any available open slots in any Division HQ, including moving Division HQ's that are packed and in truck form. While in practice, this concept seems quite interesting and unique, in practice I never really found that it made much of a difference. Without these unique points, the game would have played virtually identically to Kohan 2 which is perhaps why they were implemented. However, if this was not implemented, this may have made the game more streamlined.
There are quite a variety of regiments, but each falls into either the category of a tank, infantry, or halftrack regiment. There is an airfield building, but you won't ever really generate plane regiments. Rather, from your airfield, you can pay for air strikes, or air recon and these are handled automatically without having to pay for the upkeep of planes, or having to worry about resupplying planes. There are also naval units, but these seem to be an afterthought. There are not naval yards, and you will only ever begin a mission with your ships already given to you. As they don't seem to be really integrated into the rest of the game's design, the naval and air portions of the game really feel as if they were added to the already established Kohan 2 game design. While not a poor integration, the feel of the air and naval design definitely leaves something to be desired. Either that or the battles should have focused on only land battles. By winning fights through a mission, or by the good management of your resources, you will gain army experience that can be used towards special operations. These are special bonuses temporarily awarded to certain regiment types, or special actions that can be performed. Like in Kohan 2, these can be used to turn the tide of a battle, but once again, I found myself rarely using these options. The unit AI didn't really have a problem with pathfinding, but the problem was more when to attack. A regiment can be standing next to each other, and one will engage the enemy and the other won't because it is a hair further away. In the same way, a building can be shelled to oblivion, but the units standing beside it won't do anything to suppress the attack. This can be especially frustrating when there is precious little room to develop your base area as in the Operation Overlord mission.
Overall, Axis and Allies is a good effort and is already based on an excellent game. (To the latter, it's already half way towards being a winner.) As such it is unfortunate that it misses the mark slightly by adding a couple of things that don't work quite as well they could have. Still, Axis and Allies does do a lot of things right and is sure to bring some good times to the RTS gamer in this the gaming dry season.
People who downloaded Axis & Allies have also downloaded:
Axis & Allies, Axis & Allies: Iron Blitz Edition, Age of Empires III, Civil War Generals 2, Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings, Allied General, 1701 A.D., Risk 2
Axis & Allies is like nothing so much as an extremely advanced and complicated game of Risk. The two games are similar in that both use world domination as their basic theme. Both are turn-based, and use dice rolls to determine the outcome of combat. That's really where the similarities end. Virtually any way that the Risk idea could be made more complex, has been done here. And, where Risk uses simple world domination as its basis, Axis & Allies focuses on World War II.
One of the main differences is that while there are five nations--Russia, Germany, England, Japan, and the United States--there are only two sides, the eponymous Axis and Allies. Controlling one nation allows you access only to that nation's armies. However, you can move your infantry, tanks, and aircraft freely through allied territories.
Each turn, you can attempt to develop special weapons and purchase new units. You can then conduct combat by moving units into enemy countries or sending naval units into areas patrolled by enemy ships. After combat is resolved, an additional movement phase to place units into position for the next turn is allowed. After this, the units purchased at the start of the turn can be placed.
Axis And Allies Pc Download Free
The biggest problem with Axis & Allies is the learning curve. There is a nice series of tutorials included in the game. These also contain example moves for each of the five nations. The tutorials are quite helpful, but don't go nearly far enough to explain the way combat is resolved.
The turns of the other nations are slow, even with the fast AI option. You can wait a good five minutes between turns. With the fast option turned off, you have enough time to eat dinner between your turns.
In short, playing Axis & Allies is sitting around waiting interspersed with short periods of being confused about what is going on. If you have played and enjoyed the board game version, you will find this to be an accurate representation. If you haven't, you'll be confused until you've gone through the game a few dozen times. And when you have done this, all you have to show for your efforts is a very advanced Risk.
Graphics: Pretty good. Units are easily distinguishable.
Sound: The music gets a little overbearing, but the sound effects are very good.
Enjoyment: Unfortunately, the learning curve keeps this game from being enjoyable for a very long time.
Replay Value: It's the same game every time.
Wargames tend to run on a sliding scale. There are simple kids games like Risk or Stratego on the one hand and complex, cardboard unit-stackers like Squad Leader on the other. And never shall the twain meet. Except in Axis & Allies, that is. Called a 'bridge' game between mass market simplicity and grognard intricacy, it offers a game of World War II that can be played in only a few hours with a couple of friends.
The game begins in 1941, when the sides were roughly equal, and ends, depending on which victory conditions are chosen, with the capitulation of two opposing capitals. Only the major powers of that time are represented: the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the Third Reich, and the Japanese Empire, the first three fighting the last two.
The CD-ROM version brings the exact rules and gameplay of the boardgame to the computer, with some extra options. A dozen or so rule variants can be toggled on or off prior to a game--things like paratroops in bombers; scorched earth; deploying new naval units in an occupied sea zone. There is also a unit editor, allowing you to adjust the cost, attack, and defense values for any unit, either globally or per side.
The graphics look exactly like the boardgame (the more attractive second edition, at least), which is a plus, and they do their job just fine. Additionally, map territories change colors with a change of possession, something impossible on the cardboard maps, and this is welcome, as it makes it far easier to tell what territories you control. Two views are available: a zoomed in view where you see a small part of the screen and make the most of your moves, and a zoomed out view that lets you see the whole world at once, though the latter's main use seems to be to let you admire the pace of your expansion.
Axis And Allies Pc Download Full Game
Hasbro has also thankfully left out the multimedia clutter that has plagued some of its other boardgame conversions, like Life or Monopoly--cutesy computer graphic animations that become tiresome on or two viewings. Mass effect 3 multiplayer best solo class. But it did not make any use whatsoever of the CD-ROM's ability to do redbook audio, and I can't believe a better soundtrack wasn't provided--the five default national songs drone on and on repetitively. CD-ROM's have plenty of room for music.
The worst complaint about the presentation of the game has to be the unit colors, however. Unlike the boardgame, where each player's pieces are molded in a particular color representing one of the sides, here, only the infantry icon is colored properly, while tanks, battleships, fighters, etc., are left a uniform grey. This sounds like a minor quibble, but it does in fact impact gameplay. For example, if you are the English player, and you have Russian and American transports mixed in with your North Sea fleet when the German aircraft attack, you must choose which transports to remove as casualties, but can't tell exactly whose transports you're pulling out, yours or your Allies'. This matters, since each country has to move in a separate turn.
The artificial intelligence performs adequately in most instances, but the moves it made--most specifically its failure to exploit weaknesses or properly garrison threatened territories--severely diminished my enjoyment of the game. Axis & Allies has been around long enough that veteran players long ago worked out precisely what each side should do on its first turn. The AI in almost every case does nothing even close to these classic openings. The programmers should have scripted the opening moves for each of the powers and assigned a high probability that one or the other of these would be made, rather than letting the AI make its own dubious determinations of what to do.
This would be an improvement because quite simply the AI is not challenging enough, and I never lost a game to it--and I always played on the hardest setting, without favorable game settings, and usually in the more difficult positions. Incidentally, I would have liked to have seen the inclusion of a 'free-for-all mode', where the five superpowers aren't necessarily permanently allied--for example, with the defeat of Germany and Japan, perhaps the UK and US square off against the USSR: 'There can be only one.'
At any rate, the AI is good enough to practice on and get you ready for the main event, which is playing against other people. The CD-ROM version of Axis & Allies does a great service for fans of the boardgame, as it gives them the ability to play each other across the Internet through TCP/IP play. While it will never take place of getting five people together around a real table, it does address a big problem for fans of the game--the difficulty in getting enough people together for long enough to finish a game.
So Axis & Allies sets a good precedent for Hasbro Interactive, assuming it takes the time to fix some bugs and improve the AI. While hardcore gamers are hardly going to care if a CD-ROM version of Scrabble or Monopoly is a faithful rendering of the original game, we should care about Axis & Allies, because Hasbro's acquisition of Avalon Hill's backlog means that we will probably see other classic mass market strategy games, like Diplomacy or Shogun, emerge in new, multiplayer, Internet versions.
On the other hand, playing Axis & Allies on a computer does remind you that is in fact, a boardgame, and lacks the sophistication and depth of a true computer strategy game, as nowhere does it have the depth or complexity or variety of a Civilization, Master of Magic, or the like. The best strategy games on the computer will always be those games designed specifically for a computer, taking advantage of its storage capacity, memory, and display capacities to create newer and more interesting challenges than the old routine of board, counters, and dice.
People who downloaded Axis & Allies have also downloaded:
Axis & Allies: Iron Blitz Edition, Axis & Allies, Risk 2, Monopoly (1999), Diplomacy, Civil War Generals 2, Advanced Civilization, Battleship: The Classic Naval Warfare Game
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |