Zadzooks: ‘Sudden Strike 4’ review

Gamers get to revisit key battles in World War II in the exhausting, real-time strategy challenge Sudden Strike 4 (Kalypso Media and Kite Games, rated Teen, $59.99).

That’s exhausting in a positive way as a player with even a modicum of interest in the history of the devastating conflict will be completely consumed by the combat and location details.

This fifth title in the popular war history franchise debuts on the PlayStation 4 console system and offers three campaigns of seven missions, each split between British, U.S., German and Soviet forces.

For those unaware, in the war-gaming genre of real-time strategy, a player positions squads of soldiers, vehicles and weaponry in live battles to automatically fight with opponents in skirmishes usually set over maps with a variety of terrain and weather conditions.

In this case, it’s control of units such as infantry, medics, artillery, tanks and support vehicles set across Europe and Russia, which is often slogged down by snow or rain.

Amateur commanders begin by selecting missions ranging from the Battle of the Bulge to Operation Barbarossa or the Battle of Berlin, and then choose a famous general to assist such as American Omar Bradley, Soviet Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov or German Johannes Blaskowitz.

Each hero offers advantages for units and can set a strategy, called a doctrine, through available skills. For example, pick Red Army legend Konstantin Rokossovsky and be able to have up to four soldiers hitch a ride with tanks or pick the Brit Bernard Montgomery with a skill that allows severely wounded infantry to carry first aid to recover.

As a player succeeds, he earns stars that will unlock game modes and other attributes for generals, such as tanks can use periscopes to extend vision range 34 meters or vehicles have access to armored piercing, anti-tank munitions.

Here’s a brief look at a mission from each campaign to highlight the mix of action and history.

• On the U.S. side, a player can help with the D-Day invasion and the Utah Beach landing on Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula on June 6, 1944, with a team of paratroopers and tanks aided by the armored doctrine of Gen. George S. Patton.

The paratroopers must first destroy a pair of bridges, attack and occupy a nearby town, and secure the areas near beachheads from behind enemy lines as best as possible, so landing boats can deliver Allied soldiers, tanks and half tracks.

That took more than two hours of work for me, even with my best efforts. The landing parties on the beach faced vicious resistance from entrenched Germans in pill boxes and heavy artillery installations as my troops tried to take over a radar station, enemy headquarters and supply base.

I lost 166 men to 136 German casualties from fighting in heavily fortified areas, and lost all of my Sherman tanks from the landing. The battle came down to one German Panzer IV D tank versus a dozen of my airborne infantry.

I luckily found a broken SdKfz 234 Puma armored car with a turret. I was able to repair with nearby supply trucks and was able to get four clean shots at the tank to destroy it and control a building. I finally secured the beachhead.

• On the German side, I first dove into the Battle of Sedan in May 1940. The Third Reich forces invaded France early in the war as part of the Fall Gelb offensive through the Ardennes forest to outflank the Allied armies.

I chose the armored prowess of Heinz Guderian (with vehicles that can open top hatches to increase vision range) and my objectives were to cross a bridge before the French blew it up and take out three areas of enemy bunkers.

Simple enough until the bridge was blown up and I had to build a pontoon bridge along a Meuse river ford using supply vehicles that were sniped at by the enemy during the daunting process.

My first attempt to complete the entire mission was a disaster as my soldiers and armored vehicles were too scattered to be effective, and rolling through a heavily fortified village became a killing field for my poor men.

The strategy that worked required I line up all of my units in one logical formation with Panzer tanks up front (the option for formations is automatically set holding the circle button and pointing the analog stick while over the units). I then offered my version of the blitzkrieg, quickly flanking and destroying artillery bunker installations and the entrenched troops.

What really shone within the forested and mountainous terrain design was the chance to attack an authentic and massive concrete installation on the French’s Maginot Line left over from World War I.

• For my first Soviet foray, I became part of the defenses against the Germans in the over 2-year-long siege of Leningrad starting in September 1941.

The atypical mission required I protect a massive convey of trucks carrying supplies and the wounded across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which was nicknamed the Road of Life.

I chose hero Gen. Georgy Kostaninovich Zhukov’s armored doctrine (with the attribute of light and medium tanks that can ram opponent vehicles) to help defend the convoy. The objective was to allow at least 90 trucks to safely pass over the ice while fending off German attacks by land and air from the north and south.

With help from BT-7M light tanks, 45mm M1937 anti-tank guns and soldiers to man them, it was a brutal mission that I failed numerous times. The gamer can choose troops to man the guns and fire at will. Only when I started using artillery to blast holes in the ice, which stopped German tanks from crossing and targeting the supply conveys, did I succeed.

The mission’s low point was watching some of my tanks fall into the icy water after my formation command was followed too closely by the artificial intelligence.

Now, perhaps the most welcomed part of the overall “Sudden Strike 4” action was not having to build and protect bases as well as scavenge for resources. The amount of work involved in simply maintaining units on the march or under attack is more than enough to keep the player fully engaged.

However, playing the game on an entertainment console and not a PC will be daunting at first. Using the PS4 controller is simply not as easy as using a keyboard and mouse to command operations.

I had a hard time zooming into and selecting a set group of units to move around the battlefield and did not fully understand what buttons to push to efficiently and quickly resupply my vehicles.

Also, the fog of war allows too many enemy units to hide and fire away from a distance. It was a delicate balance to send small groups of troops on a suicide mission to simply see more of the battlefield while balancing those losses with quick attacks using armored vehicles.

And, as mentioned earlier, the game’s artificial intelligence is not so bright. Directing a group of soldiers to a faraway location often resulted in stragglers traversing a longer path than intended and being killed instantly.

As far as authenticity, developers claim to have visited the actual locations and museums to get a more detailed feel when recreating the terrain, and it really shows when examining the small towns and farmlands.

It’s common while in battle to appreciate moments such as a modified Sherman tank plowing through stone hedgerows; a supply crew member pouring gasoline into a tanks and gushes of liquid spilling around him; a soldier puffing a cigarette; and the sound of a tanks firing rounds and the cries of anguish from a fallen infantryman.

Gamers will even get great briefings on the mission; peruse narrated pages from a diary catered to the strategy of a successful mission and watch archival video footage of the war.

If the campaigns were not enough, a gamer can take part in skirmishes versus the computer, or a multiplayer mode with up to eight players (four versus four) battling in online matches.

Overall, I continue to stay mired in a world war having barely been part of much of its horror. “Sudden Strike 4” has some technical issues on the entertainment console, but it delivers an education as well as some intense combat for tacticians in the family.

Note: I also suggest watching any of the more lengthy documentaries on the conflict in between game sessions to feel further immersed in the action.

I checked out the Smithsonian Channel’s six-part, color series “Apocalypse: The Second World War” on Netflix. I was very pleased to learn a bit more about the Battle of Sedan (the town on the other side of the Ardennes Forest) and the Leningrad evacuation. That was actually part of “Sudden Strike 4’s” collection of missions.