Remember when games being 3D was a groundbreaking move? Super Mario 64, Sonic, Virtua Fighter, Sega Rally, Daytona USA, Pokemon Stadium, and Resident Evil, to name a few. It was an exciting time for video games in the mid to late 90s. Colour me surprised when, in the year 2024 of our Lord I found myself once again excited for a game going 3D. It’s no longer a Nintendo or Sega classic, those are long gone, but it is one of my favourite wargames series, with Armored Brigade 2.
For those of you who don’t know Armored Brigade, the unwashed and uneducated masses, this is a title that came out in 2018 and it’s a top-down, real-time tactical wargame with a focus on realistic Cold War engagements. Despite its voluptuous content (in both units and map sizes), the number of weapon systems simulated and the tactical depth of the engagements it created, Armored Brigade’s top-down view immediately limited its appeal to being a wargamer’s wargame.
Its two-dimensional limitation made the map height too hard to read (not at all helped by a clunky line of sight tool and even worse isometric view), creating confusion as to why some units weren’t fighting when- in theory- they looked like they had a line of sight. And it made the game way harder to control and keep track of than it should be because it limited your IRL line of sight into the battlefield. Besides, for 3 decades, gamers have gotten used to playing their strategy games in three dimensions. Unless there’s a clear artistic choice behind creating a 2D game, there’s no real advantage to do so- other than budgetary reasons, I assume.
Six years later, Armored Brigade 2 fixes the main issue I had with the original Armored Brigade: it brings back this often elusive dimension in wargaming: the third one.
Now, this isn’t to say that Armored Brigade 2 is suddenly the perfect. It isn’t, as it’s still marred by some of the faults of the original, like a not-stellar AI, the lack of granular controls for infantry, and the ridiculously large order delay for some basic actions (2 minutes to order a unit out of the killing zone? It should do that automatically!). But the game is still mid-development, so I’ll save my criticism for when the game comes out. What this move to 3D means is a massive gameplay improvement over the original in every way imaginable in terms of battlefield perception and decision-making.
Unit positioning can now be done quickly by eyeballing their line of sight, instead of painstakingly using the weird line of sight ruler thingy. Decisions can be made faster- even if it doesn’t matter for gameplay purposes, because you can pause the game whenever you want- because you can almost always see the whole layout of the battlefield. In turn- this also means that defensive positions can be established quicker, and with a higher degree of effectiveness because you no longer have to guess (or mind-map) the layout of the land. One final, but really important aspect we usually overlook is the spectacle of the whole battle. In Armored Brigade, you could sit back and see sprites firing at each other from a top-down perspective and get some fun out of that, but in Armored Brigade you can zoom your camera back and see every single bullet being fired in the valley below. If you want, you can also zoom to ground level and see your troops crawling, shooting and bleeding.
Overall, I think this move to 3D already makes Armored Brigade 2 a lot better than Armored Brigade and I can’t see myself going back to the latter. If I had one request I could make to the development team is that they add an option to remove the order delay if the player so chooses. It won’t detract from the experience of everyone who enjoys the system, but it will be a fantastic addition for those of us who want to have a bit more control. The order system works fantastic on paper, and no doubt it worked perfectly for Flashpoint Campaigns, but when you commanding troops on the ground, it doesn’t feel realistic in the slightest to have your units brainlessly march into a killing field because some order is going to take a couple of minutes to arrive. This kind of tactical choice happens immediately, and in Armored Brigade 2, this should be the case as well.
I hope you enjoyed this small peak into Armored Brigade 2, and thank you so much to Slitherine for letting me play the game a lot earlier.
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