For strategy game enthusiasts, the last few months have seen some excellent releases. Wargame: Red Dragon continues this impressive list of with the latest entry into popular real-time strategy series.
Wargame: Red Dragon is set during the Cold War like the previous games in the series, but this time you head out to the Far East to do battle. While the game is an impressive RTS with excellent visuals, the steep learning curve could turn some players away from the game.
Like many games released, Wargame: Red Dragon is split between the offline single player campaign and online multiplayer. For the review I focused more on the single player, but by taking a peek at the multiplayer side of things, it looks like it offers a robust online system to please even the most hardcore of fans.
The single player is split between five different campaigns. While five sounds like a small number, each campaign features a large map that the player must control to successfully complete each campaign. It is a little confusing jumping into the single player as the levels do not progress chronologically. The first campaign that is presented to the player turns out to be the fourth campaign. The campaigns are ordered by difficulty, not the date they take place. If you’re trying to get into the story, this can be a little disorienting at first.
Wargame: Red Dragon takes place between 1979 and 1992 as war intensifies in Asia between NATO and communist countries known as PACT. This fictional story will take you to the Korean peninsula, the Russian and Chinese border, and British controlled Hong Kong. It is an interesting alternate history story that does enough to draw you into the game.
Unfortunately the gameplay of Wargame: Red Dragon takes quite a bit of time to get used to, and you have to do this with a very limited tutorial. The tutorial in the game is non-interactive, and can get quite confusing and disheartening if this is the first Wargame entry you are playing. I stated it before, but Wargame: Red Dragon is a hard game. It doesn’t help that the game features a text-only tutorial. Unless you take notes, it is easy to forget everything you read in the long tutorial once you jump in-game.
When you are ready to take on your enemies, the game is split into two different game styles. The first style is presented to you as a map of the area you are trying to control. The area is broken up into different sections. During this turn-based gameplay, you can move units around in the area to try and block advances from the enemy, or set up attacks for yourself.
Once a battle is initiated, you’ll be taken to the battlefield. To begin a battle, you can place units in the map in your control zones. You want to control these zones because they’ll re-supply you with reinforcement points, which you can spend on reinforcements while in battle. Before a match begins, your units spawn instantly where you place them. But once a match begins, your reinforcements will use designated reinforcement areas to enter battle. Sometimes these reinforcement areas can be far away from the action, so you have to be calling in new units constantly.
With the game split between the turn-based strategy and the real-time strategy, it offers a unique challenge to the player. You have to make sure you have certain units to defend in the section of the map during the turn-based part. If you don’t, you can lose a match very easily. And don’t be surprised if you lose quite a few matches in Wargame: Red Dragon.
Wargame: Red Dragon may be a frustrating game, but it does look fantastic. You can zoom in closely on the battlefield and make out quite a bit of detail on your units. The game also features a cool effect when you zoom all the way out. The battlefield is then presented as almost a sandbox. It makes sense, as the Wargame series is from the same development team that made RUSE.
In the end, Wargame: Red Dragon is a strategy game meant for hardcore strategy fans. If you’re a newcomer to the series, you may be put off by the lack of a tutorial and feeling lost at times. But if you can get through and learn how to play the game, you’ll discover a fantastic strategy game with a very rich community.
Score: 8.5/10
Wargame: Red Dragon was developed by Eugen Systems and published by Focus Home Interactive for PC and Linux on April 17th. A retail copy of the PC version was provided to us by Focus Home Interactive for reviewing purposes.
