CALL TO ARMS aka CRASH TO DESKTOP aka COAL TO FARM is the worst game I have ever played in the RTS genre.
Easily the most embarrassing and ineffective German-Ukrainian collaboration since the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)
After playing Syrian Warfare and Ukrainian Warfare, I felt some sort of moral obligation to give the German-Ukrainian Call to Arms game a play. After all, Call to Arms is basically Red Alert: Generals but incredibly bad with some subpar ideas here and there, but it did influence some massively superior and more fun games. The Russian developed Warfare games are everything Call to Arms 1 is not. They are punishing in an immersive way, ATGMs actually destroy vehicles, they are built on an engine that is not two decades out of date, their difficulty spike is tied to gameplay and mechanics, not piss poor design. The kits, uniforms and weapons are far more accurate and the games have the balls to tell, albeit insanely biased, real world battles with real world countries, factions and ideological struggles.
Call to Arms is the opposite of the Warfare games, which is why it sucks because even by the time it was released, it had all the basis to be much better. The Warfare games are vastly superior, because they are the opposite of the first Call to Arms. Ostfront is without a doubt, a beloved, far more refined product, but this is Call to Arms 1, a game that was rightfully abandoned by the develops.
There is something important to note about CTA, it was never meant to be good. A friend of mine put it together fairly well:
"The guys behind it are not a real studio, they are a conglomerate of Men of War modders that got together on Discord and flipped the original engine. All because 1Company got bought by some slop jank slop jank studio before they managed to release a x64 game. The x32 limitation caused so much frustration and lag for modders due to community demands of grand scale battles, that this was their attempt to remedy such. Ultimately, they did the best they could but gave up after failing to enable fullscreen 4k. The RTS concept itself is ingenious, but its just tragic no one bothered picking up where they left off."
There are four things that I call the Fatal Quartet of why Call to Arms Sucks ♥♥♥♥ and Balls.
1.) The engine was outdated on release and it still sucks in every regard now, with incomprehensibly bad UI, unintuitive garbage controls, extremely poor scripting and generally, it is a 2009 game that looks like a 2011 game, with all the charm and jank of a 2003 game.
2.) The mulitplayer is non-existent that its gatekept by the saddest fan base of games in existence, the Homoerectus Fatguyiticus Man of War playerbase. They hate playing with each other, but they hate playing with newcomers even more. As a result, all you really get is a single player experience which is absolutely, grotesquely garbage in every single way.
3.) So, the engine sucks, the gameplay sucks, the presentation sucks, you know what else sucks? 30-40 hours of the same 4 generic, overly dramatic slop tracks every mission and always out of place.
And finally...
4.) The developers do not have the skillset to fix the game. And the garbage left over, they are oddly defensive of. Especially DJSatan, who despite pretending to be a game developer, has always been a Man of War modder with terrible gimmick ideas and fundamentally believes that using slow mow, meta knowledge from continual restarts and save scumming is "all apart of the experience". There is a reason these guys are not published by any truly relevant studio.
The first two campaigns, the US and the not-ISIS/moderate Syrian Jihadists, are absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ missions. Extremely poor, irrelevant writing, outdated even by the standards of it was emulating a modern war at the time of its release. Missions are dull, the maps are uninspired and ugly, the best map has the most infuriating and near impossible objectives. When it comes down to pure gameplay, CTA is all gimmicks, poor visual fidelity, poor controls, poor bindings, poor pathfinding (the absolute worst and most pathetic in any modern RTS game) combined with even poorer unit reactivity. Everything looks bad, feels bad, sounds bad and generic, units fail to engage enemies in close proximity, making certain missions absolute chores as you look mindlessly in bushes for a single enemy AI with no ammo hiding in plain sight, but invisible to an entire army.
Enemies mindlessly walk and run in straight lines to objectives, the AI on both ends are incredibly poor and do no reflect any doctrine whatsoever. Both campaigns offer the occasional interesting idea, but every mission is more or less the same. Clear the map, destroy the tank (that is often immortal because the developers have the worst armour damage system in the history of RTS games), hunt down AI, waste your time, waste your life, waste your ammo on engagements that would be easier to survive IRL, the whole game is a waste of space on my computer and the meager amount of space it does take up is far too much.
Far too much mindless defend missions, once again, to artificially pad out the game to obnoxious levels. 30 hours for all singleplayer mission content and its 30 hours of pure slop for the most part.
The Bundeswehr and Russian campaigns... are actually great? Sure, the German campaign COULD NOT help themselves but to add more Middle Eastern desert slop and broken stealth missions, but the environments are great, the optimization is at its best. The Bundeswehr play like an actual Combined Arms force unlike the American faction and the flecktarn looks and works great. The Russian campaign crashes a lot, but not nearly as much as the base two campaigns, but ultimately is the definitive singleplayer experience for the game.
The Bundeswehr missions take us into an East Ukraine parallel, the rebel forces even have not-too-subtle Donetsk People's Republic flag patches and S.T.A.L.K.E.R's Bandit skull emblem. There is also an equivalency to Wagner PMC. The first mission is the best, partaking in a siege on a pseudo-Donetsk Airport. Sadly, each mission following greatly fails to live up to the incredible start, but each mission here is vastly superior in everyway to the US and GRM missions.
The Russian campaign is full scale, peer-to-peer, combined arms combat between the Russian Federation and NATO, with a remarkably decent plotline. The DLC came out months after the actual full scale invasion of Ukraine and thus, unlike the Bundeswehr campaign, actually does not deal with a Ukraine paralogue. Rather, Russian forces engage NATO in the Baltics after a seeming attack on the border, leading to North Eastern skirmishes in snowy regions and border cities, with also an exciting mission for the liberation of the encircled Kaliningrad exclave.
The campaign is strong throughout, but the scale of battle ends up killing the frames time to time and outright crashes the game. But at least it is far more justified than with nothing happening in the US and GRM campaigns in terms of scale and grandeur.
The final Russian Federation mission is the only good special ops mission in the game, as a Spetsnaz team is ambushed during an operation to take down the arms dealer who started the whole conflict (somehow). It is a great bit of micro drama, mirroring Russia's actual interventions in rebel controlled areas prior to the invasion and after and I actually accomplished the mission with only three and later two guys due to the early massacre of my unit in the ambush. As a result, the urban combat was intense, high stakes and took extreme tactical prowess and maneuverability. All in all, a very memorable good moment in a terrible game.
I was really hoping Call to Arms would be krautspessmagik or a rare non-STALKER Ukrainian gem, but all I got was coal. Pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ coal.
Worst 30 hours I have spent in my entire life.
