Great Battles of World War II: Stalingrad

With highly detailed graphics and emotionally charged music, this war epic still lacks a few elements to be considered a world-class game. Stalingrad puts you in the command of either a Red Army battalion or the German Wehrmacht over a series of missions, all faithfully recreated according to the real events which took place in the historical battle for Stalingrad in 1942. The interface is well conceived: every menu has its own background, filled with historically accurate objects such as field binoculars or a red star from a Soviet officer's hat. Images of troops, vehicles, buildings, and landscapes unfortunately look two-dimensional, and we were disappointed you can't zoom or rotate the camera during action. Still, we appreciate the level of detail in every part of the game. An especially nice touch of Stalingrad is the program automatically adjusts its speed to your computer's available memory resources. There is no game tutorial but a few help screens that in the end aren't very helpful--we couldn't get past the first challenge as we were still unfamiliar with the game's mechanics. Overall, the game's AI is substandard--troops suffer with this, and often can't reach destination points quickly enough because of bad path finding. What's more, the units are small and shoot too far, and are very difficult to see as they are the same color as many of the game's backgrounds. Serious war strategists may find Stalingrad attractive, but we feel this real-time strategy game may be too challenging for a broader gaming audience.