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An RTS on steroids! That's right, steriods!

RTS fans love these games because they give us the commander’s seat during real and fictional wars, letting us make decisions and call the shots. Most of these games take little time to learn and are all pretty much the same. Right clicking moves units here, left clicking choose specific units, click dragging selects groups of units, etc.

Now imagine if each one of these units had a personality, a motive, a code of conduct. Imagine if they had morale. In Theatre of War, units not only perform specific tasks you order them to do along with what they were trained to do, but all of them will perform these tasks differently depending on things such as (but not limited to); morale, training, field experience, leadership abilities, driving abilities, and other attributes that translate into military fortitude.

One thing that is in abundance is realism. This game excels in the area of realism above all other RTS games that have seemed to water down the WWII genre over the past few years. Where most games take a more arcade approach in terms of appealing to the masses, ToW specializes in making the game as realistic as possible without actually getting your face shot off. Imagine Company of Heroes but with an RPG twist. All of the units (and I mean ALL of the units) are customizable. They gain experience with their trial by fire and continue to as long as they stay alive.

With incredible realism comes incredible frustration. Nothing is overlooked in this game. An example is assigning a unit to a vehicle. In a standard RTS when the unit approaches the vehicle, they ‘snap’ into the tank. In ToW it shows the actual animation of the unit climbing into the tank and sliding through the hatch. You can see Howitzer crews loading their guns and firing. The detail is mind boggling. In one case, my attacking tanks were attacked and some of them lost mobility from hits to the tracks or engines, but still managed to fire from a fixed position.

Like other games that command this kind of patience and experience, it will exclude the more casual gamers. With a campaign that covers 5 different factions (German, French, Russian, Polish and Allied armies); the game covers 40 missions based on real world battles. There are 30+ maps that are completely destructible and can become ever more hazardous from weather and how the battlefield is used.