Gettysburg: Armored Warfare

Gettysburg: Armored Warfare is a tough game to review in many aspects. Not due to its concept, which is great in theory, but because it is executed very poorly. The game has an interesting setup and story behind it – taking place during the Civil War, where you’ve brought some weapons from the future - or modern day from our point of view, back with you and given them to the Confederates to help try and change the outcome of events. So what you end up with is cavalry fighting side-by-side with tanks, machines guns and other similarly devastating machinery – crazy stuff. All of this makes for a great selection of units to choose from in two modes of play.

The first mode involves picking a unit to control and playing in a third-person perspective. The other allows you to control an entire army and use them in a real-time strategy fashion to take on the opposition. Here you can zoom in and control individual units at any time when the situation demands it, and them zoom back out again to order multiple units around. The latter mode is the better of the two and makes for a pretty engrossing experience, especially when old and new combine.

Sadly, there are some things that totally let the game down and make it unplayable to a certain extent. The release code is littered with a long list of bugs and crashes, some minor and some rather significant. It doesn’t even seem to a problem with one particular area either, with issues popping up across the spectrum. The game also suffers from a weird lagging in the multiplayer from time to time that when witnessed makes you feel a little spaced out. Other than that though the game runs pretty smooth…

…no wait it doesn’t. The whole package is lacking the polish that you would expect from a modern day game. Animations are a prime example of this, with certain ones missing frames, making some soldiers look rather reminiscent of a Puppet Nurse from the Silent Hill series, whilst others look very stiff and when doubled by the lag make you laugh at the sheer idiocy of it all. In addition, certain vehicles slide sideways when you’re in them, the aiming of some units is a little off, and a few sound glitches are thrown in for good measure.

There are also issues with the balance, particularly the tanks and Zeppelin’s that are massively overpowered in the right hands and can flatten the opposition. As are the APC’s (Armored Personnel Carriers) that are hard to take out and it requires way too much effort than it perhaps should. Some of the standard units like the cavalry really don’t seem to have any use whatsoever and their movement is almost nonexistent, resulting in them being brushed aside like bowling pins. Snipers are also a little underwhelming and struggle to find their target, at times even pedestrian about the task at hand.

After reading all this some of you may be thinking "so that’s that,” but the strange thing is that I can see a great game underneath the overbearing mountain of problems. This game was essentially a one man effort – yes, one guy - Dan Green of Radioactive Software. He has been working on the game for well over a year and browsing through his past projects it seems he has had this general idea for a while and experimented around with other themes, but he finally settled on Gettysburg and pushed it the rest of the way from there. You just feel if he had a team behind him who could have helped address some issues, or provided the resources to build upon these ideas then it would have vastly improved matters.

As many problems as the game possesses I still had fun playing it, and there are a few saving graces here and there that don’t make it a total waste, such as the combination of its cool theme and laidback Micecraft-esque sandbox styling’s. It also isn’t a game that beats you over the head with the intricate details that many modern combat games tend to do, and relays everything in a more approachable way, complimented by some nice RTS style mechanics that lend to it being fun in a more expansive way. However, despite all this it’s hard to look over the drawbacks in other areas and with everything it has going for it something is always there to remind you of its gaping flaws.

The bottom line on Gettysburg: Armored Warfare is that it is a disappointment. The game in its current state is not fit for release and feels more like a beta than anything else, and this is despite its $10 price tag. It’s a shame, because the game had a lot of potential and I would have loved to see it succeed, but it doesn’t just break one, but many of the expectations that I, and I’m sure many others had placed upon it. Hopefully with a lot of work from the developers and some serious consideration from what the fans feel is lacking right now, they could work on getting it into shape - but for now it falls far short.

Gregory Curtis, NoobFeed.com