WWII Frontline Command also does a really good job of forcing you to use terrain and tactics which can further slow things down. If you do screw up and haven’t saved then most times you are going to have to restart the mission. The missions themselves are excellent recreations of some of the major battles of WWII. From pre-Normandy through the end of the war you get to see what Allied troops had to fight through from a different perspective. The D-day mission is a trip! I’ve stormed the beaches from a FPS perspective many times but playing it from this perspective puts another twist on the hell that D-day must have been.
Performance wise the game ran really well at 1024X768 with all of the options turned up on my P4 2.667 GHz PC. I did hit occasional glitches as the game loaded a section of the map from time to time but nothing significant. Mission load times were also pretty quick considering how much data had to be loaded.
I did have a few gripes about the game. Grouping units can be a bit of a bear as the game allows you to have main groups and sub groups. I often got caught up trying to separate out the units and ended up having all of the units in one big group where I wanted smaller groups. Given the deluge of WWII games on the market, I did feel a little bit of “Hey, I’ve been here before” more than a few times.
WWII Frontline Command does a better job than most of recreating the atmosphere but there is a lot of been there, done that in the game.
Overall
WWII Frontline Command has a lot going for it. The binocular and fog of war effects are outstanding and provide a nice little innovation that will hopefully be picked up in future RTS games. Building on that, the ability to hear units that are out of sight is also a nice little feature that adds to the game play. This helps offset some of the downsides like the slower pace of the game (although some people will see this as a plus) and the problem of differentiating units at a distance. At the end of the day
WWII Frontline Command is a pretty solid RTS but it's not quite there among the pantheon of the other RTS games out in the market.
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