Wargamer Weekly: To End All Weeklies By Joe Robinson

It’s been another good week in war games, with the release of a highly anticipated (and excellent) real-time tactical game, and lots of interesting news to boot. On Saturday I’m going to attending another operational ‘megagame’ war game, this time on the First World War (in honour of the recent anniversary).

I’m on the French team and it’s 1917, so it should be suitable fun/horrific – look out for a full write-up sometime next week.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Steel Division II

The first development diary for Steel Division II has landed! It mainly goes into more official detail regarding the single-player campaign mode, which they are calling ‘Army General’. We spoke with the devs about this aspect recently, but there’s plenty of fresh tid bits and game assets to sink your teeth into.

You can tell they’re really giving this mode all the attention it needs though – “a game within a game”, they’re making it so that players, if they want, can choose to just in engage in the strategic/operational layer and not worry about real-time tactical battles. Kind of a waste of a gorgeous tactical engine if you ask me, but Total War often teaches us that you don’t need to fight EVERY battle to win the war.

Matrix Games

Nothing much happened news-wise from Matrix this week, although they did release Armored Brigade and Order of Battle: Endsieg.

Our review of Endsieg is still on its way, but you can read up on what we thought on Armored Brigade here. Stay tuned for Monday evening as well, as we’ll be covering Slitherine’s mysterious announcement.

There’s also been a new development diary for Panzer Corps 2. It’s been confirmed that the game will not be releasing this year, and the diary gives a little insight into what kind of map types are available.

General Staff

Dr Sidran’s ambitious General Staff wargaming project has just released its Map Editor into beta testing. This is available to anyone who backed the game via Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, as well as a choice selection of additional testers.

Grand Tactician

It’s just one dev diary after another today – Grand Tactician, a real-time operational war game set during the American Civil War (yawn) has also dropped an update. They go into more detail regarding the visual work they’ve done so far – essentially instead of a low-poly 3D model, they’ve gone with a high-quality 2.5D sprite visual effect instead.

They also talk a bit about where the game is at in terms of development, and about some of the naval features they want to include In the game.

Is Combat Mission: Shock Force 2 Out Yet?

Not that we've heard, no, although to pass the time we'll have an article on the demo going up next week.

Has your GMT order shipped yet?

Nope, still haven't heard anything - Bill spoke to them recently and they are still behind on orders from the sales event they held last month. Doesn't sound like they expected the level of attention they got, but hey, the 50% discount alone pays for shipping to the UK, so of course I was going to jump on it.

New Game: Murphey’s Heroes: The Hurtgen Forest

To round off the week’s update, we’ve got another new war game release. The chaps over at digitalgameworks have released what looks like a tactical WW2 squad based game called Murphey’s Heroes: The Hurtgen Forest.

We would have been happy with the Ardennes beggars can’t be choosers – if nothing else this game shows that the developer is improving their skills with graphics engine. What the gameplay is like remains to be seen, however.

That’s all for this week’s update – if you see anything else worth highlighting, let us know in the comments!