Axis & Allies : Games : Web Wombat

Like a lot of games released recently, Axis & Allies isn't fundamentally a bad game, just an innately flawed one. I'd just like to make that clear before I begin. It has some good features, but overall it needs more polish.

Based on a cult board game and using the Kohan II engine, this is the Powers duking it out at the height of World War 2.

Nearly. There are reasons for the 'nearly'. Good ones.

Axis & Allies attempts to streamline the RTS/turn-based formula. It wants you to focus on the big picture, rather than micromanagement, and borrows liberally from both the Civilisation and Command/Conquer models of warfare in doing so.

As such, you don't harvest resources, but rather, by building depots for each of the two resources (oil and ammo), you gain a positive cashflow (the 'third' resource, money).

You have to keep building depots to fuel your increasing army, and if you fall behind you can find your positive cashflow turning into a negative cashflow. Adding to that, your units slowly lose health until you fix the deficit.

Using the same tack as Civilisation, you build units in companies, which represent multiple units, rather than singular avatars. Each company must be attached to a headquarters, and for as long as the headquarters they are attached to exist, they will be supplied, and can fight in battles. The moment the headquarters goes, they must re-attach, or else they are entirely vulnerable to attack.

Axis & Allies provides four modes of play, your standard Campaign, Skirmish and Multiplayer (LAN/Internet) modes, and then World War II Mode, where you take up the flag of one of five world powers. They are:

Great Britain
Russia
USA
Germany
Japan

Next you pick one of their generals to lead the troops and then you fight to take two opposing capitals. Staying somewhat true to the board game (units move at different rates to board-rules), the campaign takes place in turn-based mode, and on your turn you can, as expected, research new technologies, engage in combat, and move your forces across the map (and more on that later).

Using three unit types (armour, mechanised and infantry) that can all move one space at a time, and lacking air and naval units, you must move across the map. Quite tedious, unfortunately, and only made up for by the RTS combat that comes into place when your units meet enemies en-route.

Some of the battles you'll engage in are
quite exciting, and for the best results vying
for supremacy online is recommended

Here you can build units and structures and generally wage war on the heathen. Sadly, and this is a gripe that plays itself out throughout the whole game, the AI just isn't good enough for you to really care one way or the other.

Any half-decent RTS player can absolutely beat seven shades of brown sticky stuff out of even the most crazily overpowered AI army.

That said, if you tire of the single player game and it's lack of challenge, there's always other humans to quash online, offering a much more engaging play.

By the same token, the world AI spends a majority of its time and money on technology early in the game, and normally fails to actually defend against attacks because it has spent all its ready dough on tech rather than the military, and so pays the price in having you running willy-nilly around and doing everything bar burying their general up to his neck in beach-sand at high tide at the low watermark.

I was talking about the map before, and I'll mention it briefly here. To go with the poor AI come some very strange flaws in the board design and tile set-up. Germany can take St. Petersburg in two turns, for instance, and if that isn't a major problem with the map I don't know what is. Playtesting, anybody?

Visually and aurally, as if continuing the trend, Axis and Allies is nothing special, and no better than your average Command and Conquer clone. Textures can look downright ugly, but overall the whole thing works well enough.

A game that won't appeal to the hardcore WWIIers in the audience because it takes liberties (including having an Axis campaign that plays out more like a series of hypotheticals than anything else), won't really appeal to the board-game fiends, again because of liberties taken, and won't really appeal to the rest of us because it just happens to be so average. There's a lot about Axis & Allies that just doesn't work. As such, look elsewhere for outlets for your bucks.

Game: Axis & Allies
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Timegate Studios
Distributor: Atari

Rating: 65%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Axis & Allies is on the shelves now.

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