Blitzkrieg 3 is a World War II MMORTS driven by the Unity Engine and developed by Nival. It’s the third full release in the franchise’s 12 year history, and is in many ways a departure from formula. The title is currently in early access, and far from feature complete, and the following impressions take that into full account. That said, many of the observations below are based on the current state of the title, and as such are subject to change.
Blitzkrieg has always been a franchise that focused less on the base-building macro-strategy integral to so many Real-Time-Strategy titles and more on individual unit control, and that is the principle shift in design philosophy made by Blitzkrieg 3.
Blitzkrieg 3 is in simplest terms, a base-building Mobile RTS on a more robust platform. The gameplay paradigm will be familiar to anyone who’s played a mobile RTS in recent years like Clash of Clans and its ilk – laying out a base, its defenses as well as production and resource infrastructure, and building an army from that infrastructure.
Like many mobile strategy titles, Blitzkrieg 3 features invisible walls on expansion and army production ruled by two major resources – in this case oil and supply. The resources replenish themselves slowly over time, but the quickest way to gain those resources is to assault the bases of other players.
The combat itself is relatively standard RTS fare, though a bit of the shallow side. You can assign units to control groups, and there is an option for move, attack-move, and halt but … that’s about it. The units are quite visually detailed, but very few of them have any sort of hot-key abilities – making every unit type across the upgrade tier and nation feel identical. They do advance in level and gain efficacy from combat experience, but since there’s no sort of unit permadeath, there’s no actual intensity to the combat.
Furthermore, there’s no Player vs. Player in the conventional sense. I can’t square off against another player’s army, and this being a Real-Time-Strategy title, that feels strange. I’ve been digging around in all of the promotional materials, and the developer and game website, and I can’t find any information that indicates that will be a release feature. I will be interested to see if a PC RTS title can have any sort of lifespan without actual multi-player.
As it stands now, the Historical Campaign feels very … early. The tutorial is a bewildering combination of uninformative and restrictive – it presents basic details that anyone that’s played any real-time-strategy title would already know, but does little to explain what differentiates Blitzkrieg 3 from any other title.
Of particular note is the fact that at no point does the title ever explain even in the most limited sense the logic behind the reinforcement mechanic. Units appear in the campaign at seemingly random intervals, without prompting by the player or control as to their timing or disposition. This takes a great deal of the strategy out of the real-time-strategy.
This has the consequence of making missions feel rigid, very much like there is one right way to proceed, and that is less than satisfying. One of the principal joys of the real-time-strategy genre is developing a strategy and implementing it properly, and many of the design choices in the Historical Campaign cramp the player’s ability to do just that.
I’m somewhat reticent to wade into the territory of bugs in an early access title. I think it’s only fair to give Nival the benefit of the doubt with regard to bugs, but as early access is essentially a dollar vote of confidence by the consumer for the developer, it’s only fair for the consumer to know the current issues affecting the game. The account management system seems a tad out of whack – it won’t remember your account game-to-game, and as a consequence you’ll likely have to wade through the tutorial randomly several times. In my experience the title has crashed to desktop 5 times in the 12 hours I’ve put into it. The replay feature seems to be malfunctioning, and I’ve frequently found issues with battle reports not tracking until a good bit after the fact – it will eventually show up, but not immediately – and with a title where the combat drives the resource that drives the game, that’s a major issue.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/QR4k402zEsw[/youtube]
All that said, given the direction of development, there is the potential for a winner here, provided the remainder of the development time is used to address the current issues. It’s quite a good looking game, and it’s got a real sense of accuracy inside the combat. The voice-overs are surprisingly well-done, and the marriage of Mobile MMORTS and RTS is one that has potential, provided you’re not looking for a deeper experience or actual player versus player.