Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism PlayStation 4 Review

Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism is the third game in the Strategic Mind series, happening after The Pacific and Blitzkrieg, but before the fourth entry Fight for Freedom. The game was initially released on Steam in 2020 by publisher Hyperstrange, but the console version is overseen by Klabater. This entry is from the perspective of the USSR, taking place on the cusp of World War II as Japan invades Mongolia. Officer Georgy Zhukov is sent to the frontlines to liberate the Mongolian communist allies.

 

Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism has a rather odd storyline. At first, it presents that there is an ongoing conspiracy to eliminate loyal members of the USSR by planting false evidence of treason. Georgy Zhukov himself is a last-minute replacement for the deposed and disgraced Komdiv Konstantin Rokossovsky. However, it soon turned into a huge "what-if" scenario as the USSR smashed down Japan and Germany and soon had its eyes on taking Poland and France for themselves.

Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism doesn't have an updated tutorial for PlayStation 4. Players are plopped right in the middle of battle without much intro to how to lead or what to do. It seems very much intended that game was really meant for those that already finished both The Pacific and Blitzkrieg and had their feet wet with the franchise's mechanics.   

Maps in the game are very large, broken up into hundreds of hexagon spaces. There are typically ongoing objectives that update as past ones are completed. This means one should expect to cross over the entire map by getting into fights, capturing territory, and engaging sudden reinforcements.
 

Because of the massive map size, one should expect a single mission to take possibly an hour or more to complete. Thankfully, players are allowed to save at any time in Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism. In fact, the auto-save feature is hyper-aggressive and may flood the PlayStation 4's storage with dozens of cluttered saves.     

Players are given access to a variety of different units, including infantry, anti-air cannons, tanks, artillery, armored vehicles, fighter planes, bombers, and armored trains. Even sub-units of a particular type will have further strengths or weaknesses - like a plane that is even better against other aircraft or ground units or extra mobile troops. The vast majority of land units require roads to move on their own; otherwise, they are automatically loaded into a truck to cross the wilderness, leaving them vulnerable and unable to counterattack.

Much like other strategy games, enemy units in Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism can retreat back into the fog of war and disappear from view. Units can still attempt to fire at an occupied hexagon but will deal reduced damage on a hidden target. Some units also provide support fire - attacking or counterattacking along with their allies. Both the fog of war and support fire mechanics can combine, with suddenly multiple invisible enemies bombarding a single attacker.

 

Because of all of these layers, common tactics include sending in a single tough unit to scout the situation and then further deploying units that can destroy key offensive units while taking little to no damage. For instance, tanks and armored vehicles might destroy the Japanese anti-aircraft guns, followed by aircraft swooping in to hit enemy tanks, and finally, infantry cleaning up the stragglers.

There are two different categories of player units: core units and temporary ones. Core units that survive a battle will gain experience points, can be outfitted with new weapons, and may gain a skill to give them more options in battle. Temporary units only assist on one map but sometimes will already be stronger than what a player could have trained up on their own.

If one wants even more troops, they can be purchased as core units with the game's "prestige" currency. Each unit is a bit expensive and does need to be manually deployed at a base. However, these extra units can be powerful if they survive and are leveled up. If players are instead recruiting because their best soldiers were killed, then it becomes much more of a risk to fill an army with fresh faces without already having a strong military.

While the core gameplay is interesting, it needs to be more balanced by the control scheme. Like many console strategy games, it is clear that the genre is meant for a computer's keyboard and mouse. There is an onscreen mouse icon, but the actual button selections and the interfaces are pretty bizarre.

X is used to initially select a unit, and the Triangle is then pressed to attack targets and move - pressing X a second time will cancel an action. The most confusing is that L1 is used to toggle a unit on the right of the UI, and R1 to toggle one on the left. Was this a programming error or some instance where pressing L1 seemed natural as a sort of "advance" prompt? Even more frustrating is this button press doesn't move the camera, leading players to go find the unit they are not highlighting.

To access the other portions of the menu, players will need to press L2 and R2 to highlight parts of the screen, like objectives, unit lists, and stats. A yellow strip will appear over this section but will remain onscreen during a cutscene or other unrelated action. Additionally, this highlight takes priority over the mouse cursor's location. For example, if one has mission objectives highlighted and then tries to fight said objective, the mouse will fly over to highlighted UI. Players need to instead deselect all menus with a square before using the mouse icon to avoid this annoyance.

 

The options button and touch screen are not used, despite it being the most suitable for a mouse interface. Instead, the circle is used to open some menus, while the mouse needs to be directly dragged onto the UI to be opened. For example, the separate prestige purchases need to be accessed from the upper right-hand corner anytime one wants to upgrade.

Even more strange is that with so many unused keys, there is no simple way of skipping to the next turn. Once again, players will need to toggle the right-hand corner to go to the needed turn. There is also no confirmation prompt, so if accidentally hit, the enemy will be able to get the jump and free set of actions. This is very strange, as actions like movement can easily be undone to set up a better position - so why not allow extra confirmation or reversal?      

Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism is garish to look at. The majority of maps are muddled with rough brown dirt and dark green forests or blank white snow. The combat stats are too small and displayed as dull green or red, making them hard to read. Combat animations are passable but nothing memorable. However, the camera will zoom in and get a direct view of units traveling to stand out a bit more. This camera change is purely random, with it happening in some cinematic moments but also when a few trucks are chugging along.

 

The biggest eye-sore is the story cut scenes. Nearly every character's face looks like a lifeless mannequin yet still has strange jiggly movements while idling - almost like a mini seizure. Some characters are flat-out crossed-eyed, and there is never proper lip sync – just mouths flapping. When several characters are on screen at once, textures also begin to distort, looking like scanlines on an old CRT television.

Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism also has a subpar sound design. The volume of everything was recorded too loudly, and players should put their television to the minimum to avoid the immediate booming of music and sound effects. It is questionable why all of the voice actings are in English - the voice actors are obliviously foreigners just reading lines off a page without a clue of cadence or tone.

Like Warcraft or Starcraft, every unit has a number of lines spoken when selected. Quips like "Ready to roll all over them" and "aerial bomb's a girl's best friend". None of these are ever funny and soon become annoyingly repetitious as they constantly are spouted at every moment of the mission. Oddly, this repeated dialogue is exclusive to consoles - on PC, directly clicking on a unit did not bring up their stats box, which is what the voice lines are connected to.

 

While Strategic Mind: Spectre of Communism has fun and engaging gameplay at its core, the PlayStation 4 version is, unfortunately, a poor port. The original Steam version has much more fluid controls and is easier to understand. Additionally, the whole Strategic Mind series often comes bundled, allowing one to get four games for the price of one. Even though turn-based strategy veterans on console won't mind, newcomers to this genre, especially those with only a console and no PC, might still be hesitant about dropping a full $29.99 for a three-year-old PC gem.
 

Kurtis Seid, NoobFeed
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