Wargame: AirLand Battle

It has been a while since I last did a "Let's Play" style review so I may as well tackle it again, and Wargame seems like a good game to try it.

So I was initially bought Wargame: AirLand Battle by my friend for Christmas. My first thought could best be described as "AirLand Battle? What kind of fuckin' backwards ass grammar is that? How is Land capitalized? Why is smashed together to Air like some ugly, Siamese twin? Stupid Swedes with their silly Orgen Borgen language probably botched the translation."

I later learned it was an actual US Military Doctrine. Man, I felt like such an idiot.

So my first experience with the game was the atrocious ingame chat. I opened to a bunch of people arguing over the military of countries, racism, transgendered people, and someone named "Adolf_Hitler" spamming Swastikas and generally offending nobody. Typical ingame chat style bullshit spewing.

I was promptly confronted with a major issue: I couldn't find any of the fucking buttons. All that sat before was a bunch of screens with the middle-most one displaying the game's title. You know you're off to a great start when the first challenge you have is finding the menu buttons.

I eventually found them in the bottom left on some kind of control panel. I know it is there for "immersion" and "theme" and all, but what back-asswards crapsack decided to put the buttons in the one location there should never be buttons? It may not seem very major but on a screen the size of a damn aircraft carrier this shit was hard to find. Don't judge me.

Anyways, I decided to try the tutorials first. The first tutorial was armored warfare.

I was given command of 4 Abrams tanks and told that this was a training exercise. I was to destroy the enemy vehicles. Promptly fuck all was explained beyond that, as I simply ordered my tanks from one end to the other. When confronted with the enemy, I ordered my tanks to spread out to avoid being clumped together, kind of like how one takes the time to spread out their daily shits to make them smaller

-wait, that analogy makes no sense at all

Anyways, I completed it without error, also learning the button at the top was for reinforcements. Not like the game would be so kind as to tell me that as the tutorial explained exactly nothing. It was a set scenario that was made easy to win.

Or so I thought until I tried the infantry tutorial.

I used a similar tactic, ordering a swarm of motorized infantry, spreading them out a bit, and moving forward. They were promptly fragmented into a million tiny pieces by a large number of enemy tanks.

Now I'm no expert, but I am pretty sure that means I lost.

What kind of bullshit tutorial is this? It gives me motorized infantry with machine guns and expects me to take on about an equal number of tanks. I quickly decided infantry was useless and went on to the campaign, fed up.

I played the easiest because I'm a sissy. It was a campaign to force the rest of NATO out of Orgenborgenland (Sweden for those who don't speak the native tongue) where my tank brigade got pitted against some cannon-fodder infantry. In the first round, I decimated them with a tank rush. Combat would promptly end at the most seemingly random times (me being the inexperienced greenhorn I was didn't notice the points system) but I didn't mind because it always told me I win, and I like it when things tell me I am a winner because of my terribly low self-esteem.

My units drove the enemy out of Sweden and into Denmark. We promptly gained some motorized infantry and smashed them again at Copenhagen, pushing them off the Jylland (the Borknork Peninsula in the native language). Command then relayed a message that I was allowed to use tactical nukes to destroy the enemy as taking the Jylland was imperative.

I decided against it, not wanting to risk all out nuclear war with the allies (a possibility I doubt the developers even considered but I fucking did because I am DoktorSoviet, master Roleplayer). I decided that my forces were more than capable of taking the Jylland with strength of arms.

We engaged the outnumbered, demoralized enemy, promptly whooped their ass, and then I was greeted with a message stating I had lost the campaign and was a failure to the Soviet nation and would be destroyed with extreme prejudice for failing the Motherland.

WHAT!?

How did I fucking lose? I smashed them! They fled for gods sake! I took the damn Jylland!

I then decided I was done. I resigned from Soviet forces, family was captured and sent to Gulag, I make life as tractor thief living in Hungary until shoot by thug, such is life in Soviet Union.

All in all, Wargame: AirLand Battle is a fantastic strategy game with lots of intricacies. I wouldn't want to play a match against the armchair general fanbase that consisted of such great users as Adolf_Hitler, but against friends it is very fun. The only downside is the AI is a cheating bitch that can sense your every move and will bomb you to high heaven and then to higher heaven until you higher then Bob Marley and Paul McCartney hotboxing in a Lincoln.