The folks at QQP decided to make a product that would make even the most die hard W.W.II simulation combat gamer happy. It had to have all of the actual units in the actual scenarios. The battleground had to be a good replica of the area in which the battle was fought, the weather had to occur exactly as it did during the battle, and all of the factors that affected the battle had to be included. Of course, the player still had to be able to modify things however they wanted, but in the end, it all had to be there. Give 'em a hard core simulation. Thus was born The Pure Wargame.
The name describes the product û it is a pure wargame featuring scenarios from W.W.II in all their glorious detail. The full title of the game is "The Pure Wargame û Death From Above: Volume I" since the eight scenarios included are all historical airborne operations including Arnheim, Maleme, Saint Marie-Eglise, Kanev, Gela, Heraklion, Syracuse, and Folkestone. Although Folkestone never really happened, QQP threw it in there as the "what if" scenario of Germany invading England based on the actual German plans known as Sealion. QQP has introduced Death From Above as the first in a series of games each offering a different theme of battle.
The first thing you'll notice about TPW is the no-nonsense approach taken towards the game. The playing field is rendered in a minimalist manner and the unit designations are simple and straightforward. It's like looking at one of those boards that the generals are always planning the war on. The emphasis has definitely been put on the playing aspect of the game and not the presentation, which I'll deal with in a bit.
The battlefield is divided into the basic strategy game hexes and is carried out in turns. All of the units placed on the field are representations of the real units dropped into the area in W.W.II and are placed in a fashion which is historically accurate. Each unit has a headquarters unit which they keep in radio contact with, allowing the units to get needed supplies each turn. Movement points have been set for each unit and the units travel across the battlefield according to how many movement points they have and how many points each hex of land takes to travel through. QQP seems to have gone to great lengths to get the actual unit strengths and statistics as close to historically accurate as possible.
Each scenario has a specific mission to accomplish but, and I liked this, instead of basing the whole game on whether or not that objective was accomplished, TPW assigns points values to everything on the battlefield so it may be possible to win a scenario without accomplishing the main objective. Of course, accomplishing the main objective gives so many points as to virtually guarantee victory but the enemy is still capable of getting more points and defeating you. Also, you can choose to be either the Allied commander or the Axis commander, thus changing the main objective and giving a little challenge for those scenarios in which one side starts out overpowering the other.
TPW has a myriad of options to customize game play. The player can modify the level of difficulty, the manner in which radio contact affects the battle, which specific reports are and aren't given, if weather is random or historically accurate and so on. In a game with so much historical detail, it's good to see that they didn't lock the player into specific settings.
The only major drawback to TPW is the way it plays. Scanning across the board is often painfully slow and when a message comes on the screen you have to wait for it to turn off, you can't click it off. This seems a minor point until you play the game and realize that you can't do anything else until that message turns itself off. You can, however, choose the duration of the message but even on the fastest setting it gets irritating. Why not just design the messages to turn off when you click them off? That way it stays on however long you want. It's just silly.
Also, when playing hex style board games where the units have movement points, and most every hex game seems to, I want to be able to know where I am able to move my unit before I actually move it. For example, going through a town takes more movement points than traveling on a road and so on. In TPW, when you want to move a unit, you have no way of knowing what that unit's range is unless you just saddle up to your monitor and start counting hexes. When you have units that can move 32 hexes in a turn this gets really frustrating, really fast. And to make matters worse, if you click on a hex to move your unit into and that unit doesn't have enough movement points to make it to that hex, it will move as many spaces as it can and stop when it's out of movement points û it doesn't warn you beforehand that you don't have enough movement points to make it. And you better pray that when this happens your unit does not end up in the middle of a whole bunch of the enemy. Hex strategy games have been around forever and this seems like such an obvious feature to miss.
TPW does expect you to know a bit about combat gaming before you play. The manual outlines how everything works, barely, but if you were a player just starting out or were new to the combat simulation genre, you could get hung up on TPW. The manual just doesn't lead you by the hand through the game. I like to see a lot of screenshots in the manual with those black lines pointing to the different things on the screen telling me what it is but TPW seems to assume that you've seen it before and left all of the helpful amenities out.
TPW is not the most colorful wargame ever developed but it gives you just what it promises, a pure wargame. You measure your success in how many cities are taken, POW's and KIA's for both sides, and objectives completed and doesn't just consider whether or not the primary objective has been accomplished. It frustrates me to totally decimate the enemy and for some reason or another not quite complete the main objective and be declared the loser. TPW takes that into account û and it also has a high score board for each scenario and averages your score over the number of times you've played that scenario. But all in all, for all of the historical accuracy, TPW feels like it was developed by someone who knew their war history and not how to make a great game. For all of the attention to detail, it comes up short in the execution of play. If you can get around those faults you'll have a good time, but I'm here to play a game and not take a history lesson. It just drives me crazy.
