The Greatest in the Series!
This is the best game Eugen ever made. It is vastly improved experience from European Escalation without all the bad things in Red Dragon. It features CO-OP campaign and is historically balanced, something which Red Dragon sorely lacks.
The Best game from Eugen
Wargame Airland Battle is the best game developed by Eugen entertainment. It was sharpest improvement from European Escalation in quality and it is missing all the bad things which they had added in Red Dragon. This is the best game this studio had ever created before they lost all of its talent from internal problems.
CO-OP
- The greatest strength of this game is that it has a CO-OP campaign. Why developers had scaled back and removed such an easy and yet, great feature is beyond me. All it takes is to allow a second player into a single player match, but Eugen simply could not be bothered to keep their game great…
Historical balance
- Eugen does not understand what wargamming is. They balance their games like it would be an RTS. They do it around win rates and nerf vehicle’s characteristics. This is absolutely terrible idea. If vehicle was amazing historically, it must remain amazing and in this game. Eugen however completely lacks any understanding of that. They then proceed to add unhistorical vehicles like Patriot or Buratino. Vehicles which would never be deployed at a scale which we are fighting in this game. These are strategic level assets and Eugen had a lot of trouble balancing them out. In general, developer is clueless about history, about correct weapon types, about historic strengths and weaknesses in this game. This is the game where USA has the best AA weaponary and USSR is the weakest in armor department… They are utterly clueless.
Lack of Bias
- Developers have bias towards Nato side. Their units are simply better. This is a result of lack of historical understanding. They do not understand history, more particularly, how good or bad were Warsaw Pact vehicles. Developers thus solely balance through their impressions. This has an impact where Warsaw Pact vehicles are unreasonably inaccurate for no reason. Tanks have unhistorical reload rates stemming from debunked myths. This bias also manifests in certain vehicles like Leclerc MBT being unreasonably too good. Another issue is that when developers converted accuracy from Airland Battles to Red Dragon, Warsaw Pact vehicles received less accuracy than Nato vehicles. Developers were caught by the hand by me for being bias and they only could provide an outrage on the forums.
Realistic maps
- Another fundamental problem with Red Dragon is that it does not put much effort in their maps. Those maps are plain bad as they are filled with choke points and vegetation. Red Dragon is simply not realistic and do not represent actual maps on which armies would clash. Even more, due to how badly they are designed, Red Dragon heavily empowers infantry which can hide in vegetation. While in Airland Battle you can employ full set of tactics. You can encircle the town. Fight with armor formations on open field. Use armor to outflank the enemy. In Red Dragon however none of these things are true. Maps are small. They are full of choke points and infantry can hide anywhere and everywhere.
Perfect Organism
- This game is an outright improvement over European Escalation. However, Red Dragon is a stagnation. It introduced poor naval fighting and developers instantly backed away from it. Everyone just ignore naval warfare while it pollutes maps and GUI. Furthermore, there are no concerns about P2W DLCs, factions are not over-tuned, game is more realistic. It is lean and healthy game without all of the BS which is present in Red Dragon.
Eugen’s Zenith
This is the high point of Eugen Studios. Later they had created still popular, but flawed Red Dragon. Afterwards, they started doing nonsense. They created Steel Division which nobody liked. Instead of developing Wargame further, they started work on Steel Division 2 for some reason. Then they realised that they have to pay the bills and they made a lot of too powerful paid factions for Red Dragon, a game which people actually want to play. Then they proceeded to rush Warno launch, because they wasted all this time doing nothing and competitors started to release their products. Warno itself has lower production values than Wargame. Airland Battles was their last truly great game. From that point onward, it was just downwards journey with them.Calicifer’s Reviews
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