The venerable World War 2 simulator, Graviteam Tactics: Mius-Front, is a videogame I described as “the ultimate World War II tactical experience with a 1:1 scale. No game does it better, not even Combat Mission. This enough is sure to stir up emotions- discussions about everyone’s taste are due to arise. Yes, it focuses only on the Eastern Front and zooms into very specific operations, but what it does, does so in a phenomenal, perfectly executed way. Indeed, what’s not up for debate is the quality and sheer amount of small detail every new DLC brings to the table- meticulously recreated orders of battles, dozens of square miles of new locations to fight on, 3D models that can make even the pickiest of wargamers blush. Its battles are disturbingly realistic, working as a perfect Swiss clock with all the small pieces coming together to a perfect cadence. It’s the most authentic depiction of World War 2 to ever grace monitor screens. The two major setbacks are a lack of comprehensive tutorials and an indecipherable UI that makes the Volnichs manuscript easy to decrypt by comparison. Those can make your life miserable for a while but persevere and the tactical game goodness is just beyond the learning curve. When it comes to the Eastern Front, Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front is to the tactical plane of warfare what War in the East 2 is to the operational level. In fact, I have a theory that if you could crack open War in the East 2, dozens of Graviteam Tactics battles would be raging within”.

The timeless classic keeps on expanding every couple of months with a new batch of DLC, after Predators In The Mist, the recently released Bird Grove will be transporting digital World War II frontline commanders back to September 1942 and place them in charge of the Soviet Offensive north of Voronezh. This comes with a “precisely recreated area of over 80 sq. km” around the river Don. Similar to all other DLCs, this also comes with the correct historical organizational struct of the units present during the action.

What’s less common, and in fact, the first time I personally saw something like this, is that Graviteam is including translated original Soviet and German Army documents they used to create the DLC. This is an astonishing public service I can’t help but commend and congratulate, especially knowing how hard it is to access some of these documents if you don’t live in Germany or Russia and if you don’t have access to the repositories they’re stored at. Not to mention you need to speak both Russian and German to be able to read them. So having this all done for free is really unheard of. Oh did I mention it is free? Yeah, even if you don’t buy the DLC, the translation is readily available on the Steam Store Page for Bird Grove and all you need to do is go to the right side of the page and click on the link “View the manual” to access this historical treasure trove. This new downloadable content will set you back 11,96€ or your regional equivalent right now due to its 10% launch discount running until the 22nd of September. After that, it will cost 13,29€.