I've bought several games over the last month or so: Elder Scrolls IV, Ghost Recon 3 and Galactic Civilisations 2 being amongst the most recent. But each has challenged my master, World of Warcraft, only to fall by the wayside. I'll come back to each, but not yet. Not Yet.
But Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday was always going to be a different proposition. Like Europa Universalis 2 before it, Hearts of Iron 2 represented a slice of that delicious Paradox Entertainment pie of which I can rarely have enough without consuming it, and little else, for a month. I have taken Germany to world conquest, Yugoslavia to European hegemony and dominated the Pacific theatre of operations as a number of different nations. So the expansion pack - Doomsday - was a loaded crack pipe of addictive possibilities, which I received on launch day and eagerly installed that very evening.
But it just isn't different enough.
The game is basically Hearts of Iron 2. There are two major differences: the addition of espionage, and the Doomsday scenario itself. The former is of trivial impact except in leaching money. Virtually any spying operations on a country make them utterly hate you, and you are very lucky if you find anything with a 15% chance of success. Your major opponents will generally display a 0% success chance for most operations that you might try.
The Doomsday scenario is fine enough. But I dislike scenarios that immediately launch you into war without any preparation, and it starts not with a period of increasing tensions but at the minute that the attack launches. Hopefully someone will approach this using the (currently kinda broken) scenario editing tools now available.
Finally, I suppose that you could say that the game extends, now, to 1953. But there don't seem to be any new scripted events, so basically this is just the same as changing the 1947 option in the config file to 1953. I have done this before with the existing game - many fans have - but the AIs for the USA and USSR build units so relentlessly that the game cannot handle the processing involved and grinds to a virtual halt in any case, so I cannot recommend it.
So what one gets is:
- Espionage - a pointless but largely ignorable money sink which is a hell of glacially slow micromanagement if you want to use it for anything.
- A new scenario
- A changed four-digit date in a config file
- More powerful, if currently semi-functional, modding tools
Obviously, this being Paradox, you also get a million, million bugs. But few mind, as the candy they hand out, although cracked and broken, is the only such taste on the market.
My hope was the addition of a series of "what-if?" scenarios. What if the allies adopted the Patton approach and sided with the Germans against the Soviets in '45? What if the Germans developed nukes earlier? What if the Soviet Union collapsed in 1942 and forced the western alliess to launch their sacrifical landings at Calais - very real possibility which was planned for at SHAEF.
And I also wanted to see a really out-there scenario. Say a Treaty of Westphalia-type Germany, with the player taking the role of one of the resulting micro-states in a Europe where the Soviet Union has collapsed, France is shattered, the UK has returned to isolation and the Americans have withdrawn in disgust.
As it is, the sole advance may be the improvement of the scenario editor tools, and the chance that they may offer just such possibilities. It wouldn't be the first time that a game had advanced mainly by opening up to the modding community.