Wargamer Weekly: Illusions of Glory By Joe Robinson

Black Friday and a few other things forced us to pull back last week, but now we’re back on the frontlines. It should be busy as usual up until Christmas, where I’ll be too busy eating and playing war games to think about writing about war games.

It’s been another varied week in war games, in terms of news and what we’ve been doing. Ian did an excellent review of the Order of Battle: Endsieg expansion, and Bill reviewed a ‘monster’ WW1 game for us as well. We also took a look at the Combat Mission: Shock Force 2 Demo and offered an insight into how the First Battle of Bull Run is portrayed in computer game.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Matrix Games & Slitherine

A lot to catch up on these guys this week.

First up: you’ll remember their announcement of Field of Glory: Empires? Well the Beta is already to go and is open to participants. You can sign up to the program here.

Strategic Command: WW2 World at War has had a flurry of activity recently as well. Some extra screenshots showcasing the various different scenarios available were released recently, and now we even know the game’s release date – December 6th, 2018. Next Thursday.

We’ve got Uncle Bill on the case, so expect our review ready and waiting for the game’s launch on Steam and the Matrix store.

Finally, one of Matrix’s Close Combat re-releases, Last Stand Arnhem is now available on Steam and GOG.com. This game is essentially a remaster of Close Combat: A Bridge to Far, and was originally released in 2011. A Bridge Too Far itself is now also available to buy via GOG, of course, but this one at least fairs better visually in terms of playing on a modern machine.

France ’40 Gold

Wargame Design Studios may have recently released their own Tiller-like wargame, Battles for North Africa, but they’ve still got their JTS remaster work to carry on with as well.

Next on their list is France ’40 Gold, and they recently put out a blog post looking at some of the work they’ve been doing with artillery pieces in the game. Excellent stuff chaps!

New Game Alert: Fields of History: The Great War

Hearts or Iron 4 may still be finding its feet in some ways, but it’s given rise to some cracking mods in the interim. One of those was the Great War mod that took the action back to 1914, where HOI4’s planning systems remain oddly relevant and engaging.

The team behind that mod have now banded together to form their own studio, and release their own game based on that mod. It’s called Fields of History: The Great War and it seems the guys have been working on it for a while - there's a Patreon set up for supporting development.

All we were sent is a trailer, but they’ve also offered for us to take a look at the game so we’ll take it for a spin and report back as soon as we can. What this means for the development of the mod, we’re not sure.

That's all for this week. enjoy your weekends!