It's all about trying to maneuver around the strength of an enemy's defenses and hitting them where they're vulnerable. The latter need to be carefully hoarded and used, though, as they're limited in number and aircraft can get shot down if you send them over AA. To assist you, there's a wide range of off-board assets to call upon, like artillery and air strikes. For example, it's not enough to just seize the immediate front, but you've got to send pincers to drive deep into the enemy rear. The battles are huge and multistage almost because of the sheer depth of the battlefield.

You often need to cut through enemy territory to seize strategic crossroads or logistical positions. Of course, your job is to complete objectives, and these are presented in a military manner. Sudden Strike gives you hundreds of units, from different types of infantry, tanks, artillery, and more, and lets you do as you please. And no World War II game would be complete without a good D-Day campaign, right? Well, it's here too. How about a German and Soviet slugfest? Check. You want Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jim with the Japanese and the US Marines grinding it out? While the map is smaller than the real thing and not a historically accurate representation, it's still huge, full of trenches and bunkers to overcome. This is basically a huge battle simulator, capable of recreating almost any confrontation from World War II. Unfortunately, some really problematic pathfinding combined with other issues put a serious hamper on the fun. In many ways, it's like a gigantic virtual tabletop wargame, an effect that especially comes to mind when taking in the 3D richness of Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory, the latest game in the series.

Oh yeah, then there's the fact that the games in the series can jump around the entire war, from the island hopping campaign of the US Navy and Marine Corps, the sands of Africa, and the frozen steppes of Russia. Another point in its favor is that it features very large battlefields full of interesting terrain, like a large swath of the French countryside or a tropical island in the Pacific. That's largely in part because it veers away from the conventions of the genre, like resource gathering and base building. The Sudden Strike series has always managed to stand out in the crowded pack of World War II-themed real-time strategy games.

Sudden strike 3