Flashpoint Campaigns: Southern Storm

You issue orders, press START, and 15-20 minutes comes off of the game clock while your units try to fulfill the commands that you gave them. The other side is doing the same thing, so the bloody story of a battle unfolds and your plans sometimes are executed as intended, but frequently they go very wrong. Like almost all defensive commanders, the role of the US commander is to hold/delay and then bug out to a secondary position. If you stand and fight, you'll have a hard time winning. As far as war games go, this one has a nice UI and lovely graphics. It is easy on the eyes and is fairly logically laid out. The battle graphics are a bit underwhelming and the audio is just serviceable, but both get the job done. I was in the army as an infantryman and was stationed in Germany for a few years in the mid-80s. It's kind of weird going back after all this time and seeing how a Cold War gone hot might have played out.

This is the most expensive game Ive bought in the last few years, maybe because Im the kind of gamer that can wait a couple (or more years) till games have a 50-80% discount. However, this kind of niche game is still pricey at 50%, and waiting for several more years might miss the multiplayer tournaments that Slitherine published games are often associated with. Now, Ive held my review till I had played a few scenarios and the multiplayer. Must have 40h or so into the game. Main pros: -The game represents a good balance between simulation and wargaming. There are ton of options, probably not as many you'd like to have once you master the gameplay, but more than enough to overwhelm new players at first. -I like the game pacing: sometimes I feel turn based strategy games are "slow" or they just can't portrait well enough the battle pace. FC SS finds a great, while realistic, balance with a wego asynchronous turn solution. I'd say a big part of the game experience is in this mechanic. Also, it is a welcome experience in a world saturated with either lighting fast RTS that need you to master the controls or being pausing every few seconds (and therefore making them unplayable in online matches for adults with daily responsabilities), or purely turn based games that feel closer to playing Risk. -Manual, tutorials and guides are thick, but I guess like any of this kind of games. The learning curve is steep during the first hours when you go through the tutorials, but once you get through, you can pretty much play. You will keep learning as you play scenarios, nothing really "new", but the experience of facing different situations during gameplay will make you aware of those and feel like you learned a new layer of depth of the game (like paying attention to the heavy rain, making your units sight very limited!). -Multiplayer: to be honest, a big part of deciding to buy this game was knowing the tournaments were coming in a future. Ive played for 2-3 years FoG2 tournaments and that's the best experience you get with this games, when you play, at ease by turns, online with other people. Community is great, and so is the development team, willing to help and answer game and other related questions. As someone who plays and has played pretty much all kinds of games, including within strategy and WW2 war games (from Hearts of Iron to Steel Division, Company of Heroes to Panzercorps), FC SS is really a gem. It is an acquired taste, for sure, niche and all; but once you put the time to learn it; it feels great having such a deep game playing 1-2h scenarios. Or 20mins a day to do your turn in an online game.

A great game that’s worth every penny. Visually appealing, with a massive amount of content and the ability to add even more content or mod the existing easily. Hundreds of hours of game play right off the store shelf. All the decision making information you can think of (and some that you didn’t) is available in easily accessible, and in most cases, multiple formats. This isn’t a twitchy shooter. You are not a trigger puller or a cannon cocker. You are a mid- to high-level commander making the decisions that others will carry out. Pray that you are right more often than not. The tension is palpable as you commit and then von Clausewitz takes over for many “game minutes” until you are able to push through the friction of war and continue to try and shape the ongoing battle in your favour. The game can be intimidating at first glance. Do yourself a good deed and READ the manuals, and play through the tutorials. If you are interested in the included editor, I recommend watching the series of six short how-to videos on Youtube that takes you through the editing process (videos by one of the devs, Charles Belva). I’m not a fan of YT learning, but these are well done and quite thorough. This is a game of parsing information, planning, and reflection as you drink your (brand name here). At the same time, it’s immersive, and when the crap hits the oscillator (and it will), it’s nail biting and teeth grinding and gratifying by turn until you can get back into the command loop. Above written by a seventy year old non-trustafarian who has wargamed every way possible since he was twelve.

simulation of combat operations from the cold war, with a great series and depth, loads of battles and options from the On Target Simulations developers who you all can trust, long term support, quick fixes of any errors found and great UI and AI with great core values of game play and Realism

This was not for me... lots of really small font text that you can't upsize.

They have abandoned the game.

Two pairs of Mi-24's are stronger than 1 SAM and 1 Vulcan detachments hidden in forest hex. At POINT BLANK contact all my AA units were devastated with no Mi-24's shooted down. I dont even mention a bunch of Bradley sections which didnt make a shot. I strongly recommend to developers to try some helicopter modules in DCS before doing this &!@$^@#&$ in their "simulator". Helicopter is just a flying coffing at point blank contacts whilst it can got shot from everywhere including its underbelly.

Abandoned. They're taking another crack at it with yet another game that will be priced at Triple AAA prices. Skip that as well, if you're not a fool.

Great game, superseded by FC:Cold War, buy that instead. I had some minor issues with Southern Storm, a shifting of waypoints crash bug, reversion of SOPs from orders, and other small things. These issues are solved with Cold War which not only looks but plays better., Once again, buy the latest, luxury model.

When you first start playing this game it feels like you are more of a spectator than a participant. However, the more you play the more you realize the control you have. As has been discussed elsewhere, you give your orders, a delay ensues, and these orders are then carried out. If you are NATO your refresh rate on giving new orders is about 30 minutes while if you are Warsaw Pact it is closer to an hour. Due to this delay, plus the delay in the units actually doing what they are asked, you really need to plan ahead. Also, it strongly favors the defense as it isn't easy for one unit to identify that there is a unit ahead and then have the rest of your units easily encircle it. Combined with a "we go" situation where both armies are each moving at the same time, the "gamey" feeling from many hex based wargames isn't present at all. As an example, in War in the East, you can send a unit ahead, identify the strongpoints, and bypass these with subsequent units you move next. Encircling vast numbers of enemy units isn't that hard because you can punch through in one place and stream through the gap. To prevent this from getting too ridiculous, that game puts an increasing movement limit where, if much combat has happened, it takes more and more movement to pass through. Still, with a unit with enough movement you can easily punch through with your tanks or armored cars to exploit breakthroughs. Not so in Flashpoint. In this, you are providing instructions an hour ahead of time, waiting for them to play out, and often your units will get in over their heads because they continue to follow orders that you earlier gave that cause them to overextend. You can give very detailed sub orders to help deal with this, but for the most part you come up with a plan, hit go, and hope for the best. The opponent AI is very challenging because you are both faced with the same limitations. Where many games give the opponent AI a "cheat" of better stats, more units, etc, to counteract human skill, this game doesn't really need that because both you and the computer opponent use the same tactical AI to execute your turns. In addition, the missions and scenarios have an ability for the computer opponent to use different warplans. You can choose to be surprised and make this random or you can choose one of a few options before starting.