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Hearts of Iron

Publisher: Pan Vision/Strategy First
Developer: Paradox Entertainment

Review by Asmodain

The history of World War 2 is wrong. In reality Soviet Union and Germany allied and shocked the world, literally.

What if?
Hearts of Iron gives you the ability to remake the outcome of World War 2. The game is powered by the same engine that Europa Universalis-series use, which causes some problems in the gameplay. The action takes place on an "roughly correct" world map, which is divided into smaller sub-territories and named after the capital, largest or most famous city. Only 3 campaigns are included, The Road to War(1936-1947) when everything was still open, Blitzkrieg(1939-1947) when the sparks started flying and Awakening the Giant(1941-1937) when USA joined the war.

Ideological crusaders
The game views WW2 as an ideological battle, where fascism, communism and democracy get in cage match. While Europa Universalis gave victory points to invidual nations making it possible with a small nation to win, Hearts of Iron gives them to 3 premade alliances(Allied, Kominterm and Axis). Neutral nations have no choice than to join one of the premade alliances in order to have an effect in end score. Of course a democratic nation cannot join the axis without influencing or couping them first.

Times up
What seperates Hearts of Iron from turnbased strategy games is the realtime action. The time can be set to advance on different settings, or paused when inspecting provinces or political map, ordering units, building or researching.

Industry is power
In order to accomplish your scheme to take over the world you need a modern army. The research model is tricky. It's divided into different sections, from infantry weapons and tactics to navy and airforce. Even basic technologies taken for granted in other games have to be researched. Researching takes Industrial capacity(IC), which is divided between 3 other things, supplys, civilian goods and building. Also you can adjust which field gets the most, but if you take too much from the people they will get unhappy, possibly even revolt. Also this has an impact on your industrial capacity. After the desired research has been completed, it's time to build some units. Everything is build in divisions(expect for airforce, squadrons, and navy, battleships have their unique names, like Bismarck, while smaller ships are stacked into groups) and showed as divisions. Divisions, squadrons and ships can be stacked up, when they form armys. In order for the industry to work, it needs raw materials, which are the basic oil, steel, coal and rubber. Also building and reinforcing armies need men, lots of 'em. Resources are gained from the held sub-territories or puppet nations, for example middle-east has bucket loads of oil, while europe has very little.

Ideologys and politics
The game views WW2 as an ideological battle, where fascism, communism and democracy get in cage match. While Europa Universalis gave victory points to invidual nations making it possible with a small nation to win, Hearts of Iron gives them to 3 premade alliances(Allied, Kominterm and Axis). Neutral nations have no choice than to join one of the premade alliances in order to have an effect in end score. Of course a democratic nation cannot join the axis without influencing or couping them first. The timeline is controlled by scripted and random events, from Winter War to the oil embargo of Japan.

Leaders
One of the things that impressed me was the amount of army leaders put in the game. Literally everyone known is there, pictured included. When you've stacked up a few divisions, you can designate them a commander. Commanders have certain bonuses, like Fortress Buster who can easily roam through fortifications and Carpet Bombers who specialize in heavy bombers.

The Battlefield
You have your army and allies, now is the time to piss your neighbour off and declare war. When you move your armies on hostile territory, you get a pop-up box which lets you select certain options, like the date and hour of the attack. Also this allows you to coordinate your attacks with the airforce to bomb the enemy an hour before the landunits arrive. Supplys are handled by controlled provinces, but when fighting on islands you need supply boats to bring them, which need protection from enemy vessels and so forth. The naval battles(in patch 1.4) are very unreal, as usually the largest naval force wins, even if the other has the technogicial and size superiority. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future patches. Ending a war is not that simple, you have the options to either sign peace, when all the territorys you gained or lost are returned, annex the other nation or place a puppet goverment. You can't make your own treatys, which trashes the political system. Though the game is very well balanced, the AI is one of the main drawbacks.

Singleplayer rating:
The singleplayer is entertaining untill you notice the weaknesses of the AI. Allthought the game is not balanced between nations, it's still enjoyable to watch Afganistan rise to be one of the big players. As the game is not turnbased and not that hardcore, it's very easy to learn.

Multiplayer rating:
Multiplayer has been cleverly dismissed as a secondary objective, as it's still very buggy. To add some more rocks in the soup, it's peer-to-peer, making the slowest connection determine the game lag. The community at the moment is quite small, but the players tend to play games through(which might last 2-3, even 5 hours!). Paradox is still releasing patches, so there is hope!

GFX rating:
Nothing earth shocking. The game allows you to choose from graphical icons and "letterboxes", which gives a nice HC-strategy feel, but has no real meaning. Though the animations are very minimalistic, the overall graphics work.

SFX rating:
When you start the game up, your headphones start rumbling to the classical tunes HoI includes. They create a very nice atmosphere, plus I like classical. The rest of the sound effects are basic machinegun sound, artillery barrage and so forth. Thumbs up!

Overall rating:
Althought HoI is one of a kind so far, it has it's mistakes and design flaws. The game is still actively patched by Paradox Plaza and patch 1.5 will be out soon with tweaked naval battles and much more. The community is working hard on tweaking the AI and making new modifications to increase the challenge in the game. Overall the game is a very pleasant surprise, as it never saw E3 or any other expo for what I'm a wear of.