The Cold War…if you lived through it, you remember it. It was a time of fear because, for the first time in human history, mankind had WMDs, and two superpowers were at a stalemate over them. Both also had big red buttons in case the other decided to use theirs. This game takes you back to that era, and lets you as the player decide what you would have done, and how the world might be different for it. Sound interested? I was too. Let’s have a look.
Story: I really do not know how much more I can say for the story of this game aside from what I just did. This is a simulation of the Cold War, starting with its official declaration and leading through the major historical events. You will play one of several roles in this global era, depending on your mode of play, but the main game settles on you either playing the United States or the USSR. What you do will influence the global story and could dramatically alter history, so there is really little else to say about the story then to state from this starting point. It really is all up to you.
Graphics: While this game does not feature the most detailed graphics in the world, it looks really nice. Your first view looks fairly bland with land and water masses and a marker to set your city, but your first view is also roughly in the middle of the zoom scale. The game does a great job scaling the map to fit what you need to see based on how far away you want to view from.
A view of the world.
A global view offers a nicely detailed overview map that scrolls to let you look over everything, using icons to mark off important locations or the locations of armed forces (the latter is marked with the flag of who owns them). Zooming in will let you focus more on specific areas as needed, and, depending on how close you get, you will start to see your army units represented by fully 3D rendered models. At its closest levels, cities also get this treatment, allowing for a bit more a visual look to the events unfolding before you. To further enhance your use of the map, there are several filters you can place over it to show you different details about what’s going on at a glance. This feature is controlled by the map UI in the lower right corner of the screen.
The UI itself, however, does have a few flaws that need to be looked into. While the top display elements make sense at a glance, that very map and the main controls in the lower left are not user-friendly in the least. You will spend most of your early time with this game figuring out what each button, panel, and floating text does and opens before you can really get going managing whichever country you chose to play.
The review continues on page two!
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