Strategy/wargames have always been some of the most popular PC games, but the genre has been enjoying a resurgence in that popularity lately. World War II based games are among the leaders of this movement, and one of the newest releases in this category is TalonSoft's Battleground: Ardennes. This is a Windows based game, good news for some folks, but there are definitely drawbacks. Fortunately, none of these problems reside in the gameplay portions of the game.
Battleground: Ardennes is a turn based, hex style strategy game based around what has come to be called the Battle of the Bulge. This was the time late in World War II when the Germans launched their last full offensive in and around the Ardennes forest in France. The offensive caught the Allies off guard and pushed their lines back, causing a bulge in the front. But in the fierce and bloody battles that followed, the Allies pushed back the Germans heralding the end of the Third Reich. Battleground: Ardennes presents the player with a full range of the individual historical battles that were fought during this time, either as the Allied or German commander, and there're a few theoretical scenarios thrown in for good measure.
Gameplay is not quite as sophisticated as some other games we've seen, but it's a little more sophisticated than something like Panzer General. It has many of the standard wargaming features such as combat and terrain modifiers, but doesn't go as far as worrying about advanced things like fatigue, leadership, lines of supply and zones of control. The game is carried out in a series of phases of movement, offensive and defensive fire, prep fire, and assaults. The movement is sequential, that is, one side totally completes a phase, then the other side gets to enter their phase, rather than both sides moving at the same time. It's a very standard structure and it doesn't try to break any significantly new ground, except perhaps in the area of the graphic style of the map, which I'll get to in a bit. The units represented in the scenarios are modeled on the actual units that participated in the historical battles, but there's really no command structure to worry about. The units are just put on the map and it's up to you to maneuver them successfully. And when there is combat, it sometimes takes forever for units to be damaged or destroyed, and you'll soon be despising the all too prevalent "no effect" message.
The attributes that the units are based on are the attack strength and range in regards to both hard and soft targets, defense strength, movement range, morale, assault strength, and victory point values. The entire game, combined with certain terrain attributes, are based on these few values, which makes for a fun enough game that's easy to understand and get into, but don't be fooled by the "unparalleled realism" that's touted on the box. If you want something that gives a true simulation of W.W.II combat, this isn't going to satisfy. But as far as providing a fun game that gives a decent feel of the strategy behind the units, Ardennes is designed to deliver.
What really makes Battleground: Ardennes impressive is TalonSoft's trademark Battleview gaming system. At the normal zoom level, you see a basic board-game style overhead view of the battlefield. But when you zoom in, you see a 3D representation of the battlefield that gives an especially good feel for the terrain. While 3D terrain is not new, Perfect General had it way back when, the style that Ardennes is done in is really innovative. Everything is seen from an isometric point of view with all of the terrain rising and falling at the edges of the hexes. It's a very nice engine that may take some folks a little bit to get used to, but I found it gives more of an idea of the importance of terrain than just different colored hexes on a map.
Since there's only so much you can do in a limited theater of war, the designers have thrown in a scenario editor to help make the game much more replayable. You have full control over placing units, fortresses and objectives on the map, as well as specifying things like reinforcements throughout the scenario and off-map artillery. But the scenario editor doesn't give as much freedom as you may want because, while you have access to the three maps that all of the pre-packaged scenarios occur in, you have to design any customized scenarios on those maps. There is no ability to change the look of the map whatsoever. So while the box says a full featured scenario editor is included, do not assume that means a map editor comes with it because it doesn't.
If you're after an especially deep game, you might find Ardennes a little lacking, but if you want something a tad deeper than just moving and shooting, Battleground: Ardennes isn't a bad choice at all. It does run out of Window 3.1 and 95, and some of the features were sluggish, especially trying to move around the map. If you have a machine with a great video card or 16 megs you shouldn't have any trouble at all, and even with 8 megs it wasn't that much of a problem. The 3D battleground is really fun to play with and gives the player a much higher sense of terrain than most any other game I've played since Perfect General II. It's a good game, and while it may not be the greatest or most exciting package ever released, it still manages to be playable and fun.
