The Wargamer

INTRODUCTION: RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL—A BRIEF MEDITATION ON THE MATURATION OF PC GAMES

We Americans love to prattle-on about “New Stuff”, as though newness were, in and of itself, a virtuous quality and not merely a fluke of chronology; we tend to lionize the creators of movies and games that break the mold (provided they do so in a suitably profitable manner!), re-define the boundaries of the possible, and surprise the pundits by racking up successful sales numbers that seem to come out of nowhere, as though the public had a reservoir of shared subconscious longings, just waiting for that one magic title to gratify an appetite many people didn’t even know they had (think Star Wars!)

By sheer happenstance, the writing of this review coincided with the publication of my first PC game review, twenty-three years ago; on such occasions, I think a little bit of philosophizing is permissible and I trust you’ll forgive this self-indulgent preface when you see how relevant it is to the game under review. Because at some point during my first few hours of playing Commander: Europe at War, I looked back and suddenly realized just how long it had been since I had stopped looking, or even hoping, to find a game—any game, in any genre—that was truly, mind-bendingly “new.”

Like all critics, I’ve sometimes been gulled into mistaking “novelty” for originality, but with today’s technology, any clever charlatan can spin-off enough gee-whiz special effects that give “novelty” to an otherwise lackluster title. So I long ago abandoned “newness” per se as a metric for measuring the worth of any game I was assigned to review. We all know what the basic recipes are by now, for all the fundamental genres. It is far more realistic, for both journalists and consumers, to study the way the “chiefs in the kitchen” have added nuance, savor, that unique and elusive soupcon of originality, to games that basically hew to the conventions of their genres; that seek not to re-invent the wheel, but to give you the sensation of driving a Porsche instead of a Saturn.

The reason for this longish philosophical introduction is actually very practical: if you happened across a monitor screen on which Commander: Europe at War was being demoed, you might watch for five minutes and come to a hasty but facile judgment like the one that went through my head as I walked away from my first look at this particular title:

Well, that looked so much like Panzer General, it was almost spooky! Same general scale, same big generic icons, same frustrating and miserly system of capturing objectives so you can earn Power Points so you can buy new and upgraded units. How much of the “gameplay” consists of making the same frustrating “choices” over and over -- do I reinforce a threatened sector, create a new armored unit, or plow those points back into R & D projects? Plus it uses the same sort of combat graphics; plus it’s the European Theater again! Enough, already! That dog don’t hunt no more, folks! Nazis versus Allies…yawn. Those blokes from Slitherene are really nice, but I just didn’t see anything here I haven’t seen before…hasn’t got the anal-retentive depth of Hearts of Iron…I don’t like the big, Grand Strategic scale all that much – makes the whole war fly by quicker than a Canasta game with Aunt Betty. At least it’s a nice looking title, I’ll grant you, but aren’t they all these days? Maybe this’ll make a decent introductory title for neophytes who want to get their feet wet, but it just looks slick and formulaic to me, and unless I somehow get stuck with it, I don’t think I’ll ask to review this one – there’s just not enough meat on its bones! Sorry, Commander, but I’m going to take a pass on your game. I feel like I’ve already played it a thousand times before!

I’m paraphrasing, of course; even ol’ Trotter doesn’t go around talking to himself in fully organized paragraphs; but that’s pretty much the sort of lukewarm response I had to that demo.

And if you, too, reached a similar verdict, based on a superficial glance at Commander: Europe at War’s clean, crisp, but ever-so-familiar graphics, you will have walked away from some of the best damn lasagna in town.

I wasn’t impressed enough by the sales pitch/demo to be “skeptical” about this game; I was more blasé, almost cynical (and to my embarrassment, I probably looked it) throughout my first demo of Commander: Europe at War. The very concept of another ETO grand strategy game just filled me with inertia. After all, how many of those games had I played, by this time in my career?

In this instance, it only took about six minutes before I realized that my first impressions of Commander: Europe at War had been wronger than the Flat Earth Theory.

To begin with the most basic information: Commander: Europe at War is a turn-based, grand-strategic/operational-scale simulation of World War Two’s European Theater. Familiar territory, right? I groaned and grumbled as the game loaded; I was not enthusiastic about this test-drive.

With a yo-heave-ho sigh of resignation, I fired up to tutorial and grumpily prepared to do my duty. But less than fifteen minutes into the instructional segment, I realized my body was reacting to a strange, almost forgotten sensation. Could it be that I was having…FUN? I had to check all my vitals—after all, it had been many years since I’d felt this way!

Then, when I actually started to play, I surrendered unconditionally to the game’s charms. Faster than you could shout “God bless General Montgomery!”, I found myself gripped by the most wickedly addictive case of Game Lock I’ve experienced in years, I until that moment, I had frankly been expecting to dislike this game (even as much as I had liked the guys who produced and designed it, and even discounting the tubs of free Guinness I swilled down on an E3 expense tab); I just found it hard to believe that any contemporary game designers, even guys as conscientious as the fellows at Slitherine, could possibly squeeze yet another compelling pastime from such a tired old nag of a theme. How many different ways has World War Two’s ETO been done? How could there possibly be a new, fresh, immersive way to treat campaigns (in real history and alternative time-line variants) that most older wargamers had burned-out on years ago?

Well, as I tried to point out in the introduction, Slitherine marketing campaign, and Commander: Europe at War’s design team itself, are not claiming to have conquered unknown gaming territory! Or, as one of them remarked during our beer-fest at O’Shaughnessey’s pub: “Look, if you’re hell-bent on reinventing the wheel, you can. You can design and patent wheels in the shape of trapezoids or hexagons, and having done something so monumentally pointless, you then have to convince people that there’s a reason for them to buy your wheels, rather than the Standard Circular Tire, Mark One. We decided not to worry about being utterly original, but to put all our concerns into making the most playable and addictive game we possibly could.” In short, the design team didn’t set an impossible goal for themselves, of high-profile “New-ness”.

Now, two years later, I can testify that aside from a similar visual style (and if it ain’t broke, why spend time, money, and frustrated effort trying to fix it?). Commander: Europe at War shares only one significant quality with Panzer General: it is a “grabber” that quickly sucked me into its world and compelled me, as few recent wargames have done, to resort to chanting that most hallowed (and insincere) of late-night mantras: “Just one more turn, honey, I swear I’ll come to bed after just one more turn!” It is not shallow or superficially thin, not by any means, and yet even the callowest, least experienced newcomer can absorb enough confident knowledge, after one quick read through the blessedly concise manual and one effortless spin down the Tutorial Turnpike, to jump right in and start testing his strategic wings.

If they have the same reaction I did, it may be quite some time before they come up for air again…