Theatre of War 3: Korea

When you ask a random gamer what he thinks is the most oversaturated genre in the present-day video game industry, the odds of him pointing towards the FPS genre are rather high. This may be the most popular answer, but the lack of fresh ideas seems to be much more prevalent among developers of strategy games. Granted, there are quite a few strategy titles that slightly adjust their gameplay to fit a certain niche, but games that really bring something new to the table only appear sporadically. This is why it is such a shame that Theatre of War 3: Korea doesn't live up to its potential. Its interesting mix of real-time and turn-based elements is marred by a lack of polish, performance issues and an overall dated feel.

Set in the Korean War during the early 50s, the player can take control over either the North Korean or the American army in the game's campaign mode. An additional faction, the Soviet Union, is available in custom missions and campaigns. In the two main campaigns, your  objective is to conquer as much territory as possible. This is initially done from a strategic map in which you can take turns to send army divisions to certain territories in order to take control of them. When a territory is guarded by an enemy army division, the game will go into RTS-mode and you will have to defeat the enemy on that map in order to claim the territory

While this mix beween turn-based and real-time gameplay helps provide the strategic element with an extra layer of depth, the execution of the RTS part of the game in particular leaves a lot to wish for. The unit control is mostly squad-based, which should normally make for compact and fast-paced movement across the battlefield. Movement in Theatre of War 3, however, suffers from various problems. Units will ignore your commands from time to time, and it will often occur that, during battle, you find an infantry squad standing still about a few hundred metres from where the action is because it conveniently decided that your orders aren't worth following after they took a few steps. It can also occur that, when a unit engages an enemy soldier, he forgets where you sent him in the first place, resulting in him just standing out in the open, waiting for you to repeat the initial order. All of these problems make for a high degree of 'babysitting' when it comes to commanding your army.

Another issue is the game's slow pace. Even at double speed, the units move extremely slow and it can take quite a while before before you arrive at the next battle. Of course, strategy always requires a certain degree of patience and preparation, but in Theatre of War 3, the balance between the map size and the density of units just seems off.

Once a battle gets going, though, the combat is quite enjoyable. It's just mad fun to level an enemy town with a tank battalion or to send the adversary's armor packing with a devastating mortar attack. These moments of satisfaction, however, are too scarce to establish a flow of some kind. The pacing is just too inconsistent, and even if experienced RTS players will have gotten used to being patient, Theatre of War 3 pushes its laid-back approach a bridge too far.

Unfortunately, the campaign does not do anything to compensate for the slowness of the gameplay. There is no overhauling story and each battle feels more like a random skirmish on one of the game's maps than a carefully designed storyline mission. In fact, gamers who do manage to appreciate Theatre of War 3's gameplay will probably be better off creating their own campaigns and missions using the game's scenario editor. Here, you can select which factions participate in the battle, whether they have some kind of reinforcements at their disposal and how skilled the units of either side are. The maps that are available are taken from the campaign, and while they are well-designed from a tactical point of view, they do look awfully similar. Bluntly said, every battlefield is a green field with a few mountains and a village. It must be said that this game goes for the realism approach, so it would be a bit unfair to expect vastly different terrain types and climates, but the absence of even urban areas does make you question how much thought and effort went into the cosmetic design of these maps.

To make things worse, the graphics are very dated. Whilst the maps look acceptable from a birdview perspective, zooming in on them will expose their lack of detail and overall blurriness. Meanwhile, the units suffer from a similar lack of detail no matter from what angle you look at them. This game does support a lot of on-screen units, but it is 2011, and even a game such as Age of Empires III, which was released over half a decade ago, still looks considerably better than Theatre of War 3. Add to that frequent stuttering, long loading times, framerate drops and even crashes, and it makes you wonder just what happened during the optimisation and playtesting of this game.

You should not let the negative tone of this review fool you into thinking that Theatre of War 3 is a terrible game, or even a bad game. Its mixture of turn-based and real-time strategy is interesting, the maps are well-designed tactically and the combat can be quite enjoyable once it gets going. When taking a look at other, superior strategy titles, however, it is questionable whether this title serves any purpose. The game has a very dated feel to it and interesting ideas are overshadowed by outstanding errors in both pacing and performance. So unless you are desparate to kill some time, you will probably be better off resorting to 1C Company's other recent strategy title, the amazing Men of War: Assault Squad.

Jesse Dolman, NoobFeed.