Wargamer Weekly: Back to the War By Joe Robinson

It’s been a good an diverse week for wargame news, which always makes the Friday update easier to write, although in terms of ‘big’ articles we’re lagging behind a bit as the month ticks over. Next week might be a bit thing on the ground again.

One thing we’re going to try and do more of though is review older games. Anyone who’s tried looking at articles past a certain date will know how mangled they are thanks to ill-handled content migrations in years gone by. It’s left many of our reviews looking very ugly. Bill’s review this week was a test of sorts but we also had a reader actually write in to suggest this as well: we’re going to be doing more legacy reviews, especially during periods where nothing else is really going on.

Happy to take requests if anyone has anything they want us to look back into, otherwise it’ll probably largely be author-led. I’ve asked Bill to look at what older wargames he still enjoys playing, and we’ll take it from there.

Meanwhile, in the world of war games…

Steel Division II Release Date

We’re not so much concerned with the weekly dev diary in general today, rather some specific bits of information that dropped earlier in the week. First of all, we have a release date!

Come April 4th, you’ll be able to unleash the might of the Red Army on WW2’s Eastern Front with Operation Bagration. Some kind of beta is due soon as well, but we don’t know when.

On top of that, Eugen announced the ‘Back to War’ Pack – essentially, they’re taking as many units and divisions as they can manage from Steel Division 1 and porting them into SD2. Obviously, they won’t be available in the Army General campaign, but you can use the new divisions and units in skirmish matches across solo, co-op and multiplayer. The dev diary lists out the eight divisions making their over from SD1, but it’s basically two armoured and two infantry divisions per side.

The icing on the cake though is that this new pack is completely free to anyone who already owns SD1. This is some small consolation to fans of the first game which is unfortunately not likely to see much more content going forward. With any luck, more SD1 divisions can come over as well.

New Armoured Commander II Build

Two builds in as many weeks for Armoured Commander II. There’s no information as to what this one does, but it’s available to download here if you’re interested

Command Ops 2 Steam Workshop

There’s not much to say about Command Ops 2 at the moment beyond what we’ve covered in our review, but a recent development should definitely be of interest to fans of the game, especially considering the price of the game's expansion modules.

Lock’n’Load have integrated their WW2 wargame with Steam Workshop, meaning that players will have a wealth of community scenarios to draw from as well as the official expansions. At the time of writing 25 items have been added so far, and I imagine more will come as the community gets to grip with things. We’re not sure what tools modders have access to, and so what sets these scenarios apart from official ones, but there are sure to be some gems to be found.

Waterloo 3D Gameplay

You may remember we recently shared the existence of a new 3D wargaming project focusing on the battle of Waterloo. Not much is known about it at this point, but the developers recently released a short gameplay video showing some basic combat.

It looks interesting enough, but it’s definitely early days at this point. Pretty, though.

Out of the Shadow (Empire)

The developer of Shadow Empire has resurfaced with their 27th design snippet looking at how the ambitious post-apocalyptic war game is coming along. In case you’ve forgotten, this is the same developer who made Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa and the other titles in that series.

We’ve been aware of this game for a while – Slitherine/Matrix were supposed to be working on it as well but I’m honestly not sure if they’re still involved at the moment. It might be they’re waiting for VRDesigns to complete more of the game before they step in. Still, nice to know the game’s still being worked on.

New Game Alert?

Take this item with a hefty pinch of salt, but a new war game has been spotted out in the wild this week. It’s called Barbarroja – which quite honestly makes me think of red wine – and it’s set on WW2’s Eastern Front 1941 – 45. It seems to be another ‘monster’ game in digital form, but there’s no AI as far as we can tell – it’s exclusively a two-player experience.

Local ‘hotseat’ and online player is supposed, with Turn-based and “partial” turns available in both modes, and online players can also try the game out in real-time. Turns represent months, with the scale being at Army Corps and Army level.

Not sure what to make of this one – MCD haven’t made any other games form what we can tell, and there are no user reviews currently. Two Curators have posted reviews, one is simply for it possessing English Subtitles, the other is in Russian so we can’t tell what they’re saying. IT looks very old-school, although also has a surprisingly bright colour palette. We’ll try and see if we can get our hands on it to find out more.

One more thing….

Clad in Iron: Sakhalin 1904 has received a free update with some content changes and bug fixes. There are some details available here.

That’s all for this week – enjoy your weekends!