Angola '86

I bought the game at the start of Early Access and patiently waited for it to be "finished". We are now in version 1.0 and I can't other than say that the game is unplayable to me. The tutorial is a slideshow that presents a lot of information without giving the player the space to experiment and get a hold of what the concepts being explained mean and work in the game. There are barely any tooltips. The game window defaults to fullscreen mode and seems to have been hardcoded for a resolution of 1920x1080. On a 4K monitor it looks just terrible. The game doesn't give any options for changing to windowed mode. I don't know if there is a good war game here. I could not find it here. Moving on.

I think I have played all of the COIN games released by this developer. I have played this one the least just simply because development is rapid and ongoing. This is the best iteration of this genre I have come across. You are in command of the South African forces in their war against insurgents in South West Africa (present-day Namibia) on the border of Angola. As I understand it, the conflict arose due to the question of whether South Africa could annex South West Africa, which had been under South African administration since after WWI (having been a German colony prior to that). This is a very interesting conflict (at some point, Cuba landed tens of thousands of troops to eventually turn the tide against South Africa) and as far as I know, this is truly the only game that deals with it. Your goal as the South African commander is to win the hearts and minds of the citizens while simultaneously fighting insurgents in South West Africa and regular Angolan army troops in Angola. You have to watch your supply lines and hunt down insurgents in your territory while using special forces troops to determine the enemies supply lines and movements in Angola and destroy them. At the same time, you must train regular South West African troops because at some point, the U.N. will intervene and all your troops must be withdrawn. There are a lot of systems at play here but not so much as to completely bog new players down. There is a tutorial, which is little more than just basically explanation as to what the UI looks like and does. Although basic, the tutorial I thought was effective at getting me started. Development is still ongoing and the developer must be working incredibly hard because some days they release multiple updates per day. The basic gameplay remains the same though and the updates seem to address balance, bugs, and quality of life. There are two main negatives but both are somewhat minor. First, it is way too easy to accidentally move your troops and as far as I can tell there is no "undo" button. This is annoying but simple mouse discipline is enough to rectify this issue. Second, as far as I can tell, there does not appear to be a way to save without also going to the main screen. Not the biggest issue but sometimes I forget and save and have to go back and reload. All in all, definitely recommend this game if you are interested in the conflict or COIN warfare in general

Great game! Historically accurate and fun mechanics. It definitely requires a lot of thought to manage everything correctly. The developer is extraordinarily helpful and supports the game. I put in bug reports and they were fixed and the patch was released in under an hour.

What a shame, I really Loved the previous two entries but this is just a complete mess. It looks worse and the controls are frustrating and irritating. Apparently this is out of early access and should be considered but frankly I'd barely consider it across the open Beta Line. The tutorial is a joke, I'd go as far as to call it a middle finger, There's currently 3... One on the main menu which is just a chaotic series of badly presented slides about the game, the second one pretends it's a tutorial but It's literally the same information copy/pasted over into a slightly better presentation, not enough to be passable though. The final one is about 2 hours worth of YouTube videos telling me how to play... I'm getting extremely tired of people thinking that these are acceptable and in way a substitute for putting the actual work in to make a basic training sequence! If you can build a game you can bloody well finish it. What's even more annoying is when I look on steam to find out this comedian has already announced he's started work on two more games!

Incredible game. Now *mostly* bug free. Have to get that first line in to bring the good news to the review pile. This game has had a rocky trip from early access to 1.0 to here but it's a brilliant concept, and it's approaching a brilliant realisation. The developer is very accessible and very responsive, and the game is getting noticeably more patched up and finished all the time if you're watching closely. Not much more in need of patching now. I hate to start on this note, but this game has accrued some negative reviews, which I believe can be attributed to the game's rough state in the recent past, which paired with an unusual premise and rules and systems which demand different thinking, could be a bit much. It's a truly one of a kind strategy concept providing a totally different perspective and experience of smaller scale warfare. These COIN games are in a class of their own. There are no other games really like this. If you're interested, these games are all we have. If you're not sure about the state and complexity of this one, perhaps check out Vietnam '65 first to see how you like the general idea. I bought this game as soon as I learned about its early access, and only just finished my first game of it today. I'd been occasionally checking in to see how it works and how it was looking. The features were all in place some time ago, but now we're feeling like a finished game. I had an excellent time with the game I played. And I already want to play another. The game's systems and ideas are very simple once you understand them. It's all about a relatively simple set of rules, tools, and possible inputs to model a fairly complex and unique situation in gaming to a satisfying degree of reactivity, challenge, and sense. I think it's a great success. The way your units are big simple models, the way your actions are all so clear and simply represented. The scale, complexity, and respect for the dynamics of what is being represented feel up to the standard of true wargaming, while at the same time there's a *handiness* to controlling all of this stuff that brings to mind something like Advance Wars. The game has minor bugs, doesn't run amazingly, you sometimes have to fiddle a bit to get the game to recognise an input, but that didn't keep me from playing for hours straight last night. I hardly noticed any of it. This game is one of those.

Very cool game from very cool dev, played and love all the games in this series and this one has gotten a lot more depth added to it from Afghanistan '11 Strongly recommend!

Ich hatte mir ein Spiel wie Afghanistan 11 erhofft, was ich sehr empfehlen kann. Leider war Angola '86 bei mir fast unspielbar auf Grund einer Fülle von Problemen. Insgesamt wirkte es unfertig. Und so unbedeutend es für einige klingen mag bei solchen Spielen, die Grafik war selbst für das Genre nicht zeitgemäß. Insgesamt war es ein großer Rückschritt in Grafik, Animationen und Ui/Ux von Afghanistan 11.

Do not purchase. This game is not playable and the dev should not have launched it onto steam in its current build. Very poor quality and needs an immense amount of work. Charing over £10 is a straight scam