Two years ago, Paradox Entertainment, a relatively unknown company, came out with the incredible Hearts of Iron, which redefined the World War II strategy game. While the game was quite good, it was plagued by a very cumbersome interface that kept most players from enjoying the title. Paradox Entertainment later produced Crusader Kings, which fixed most, if not all, of the interface issues from Hearts of Iron. So, after discovering a way to make an in-depth strategy game, Paradox decided to try its hand again by making Hearts of Iron 2.
Hearts of Iron 2 puts you into a leadership position of a nation during WWII. You can pick various time periods, from 1936 to the end of the war, or even various battle scenarios. You manage multiple aspects of your nation, including resource allocation and trade, unit production, infrastructure construction, and so forth. Fans of the previous title will easily get into the game, but they will also notice many things have changed.
First, the way combat is handled has changed quite a bit. In the original title, you had to move your units into the province you wanted to attack. You were able to set up times for them to show up so you could bomb the enemy prior to the attack; you could also choose to use a tank blitz to break up enemy formations before the ground pounders showed up to finish the job. Combat still is run on a time basis, but instead of waiting for the unit to actually make it into the province for the battle to start, the battle is now resolved while the unit is moved into the selected province. This is a much more interesting method, as not only are you able to immediately watch the battle, but this also simulates fighting through defenses. (Army units don’t normally wait for you to show up in their backyard before fighting, after all.)
The battles are resolved via numerous factors. First, you have morale and organization: As your divisions wage war with each other, their organization and morale begins to fall. The winning army is the one that manages to push the opposition’s morale or organization to zero. Each unit has a number of stats that go along with them: Soft attack, which determines damage inflicted upon infantry units; hard attack, which is damage inflicted upon armored units; and air attack, which damage inflicted upon aircraft as well as their associated defenses. These numbers, along with technological advancement and commander ability all factor into whether the attack is a success or ultimate failure. Combining units together creates an additive affect on morale and organization, so two units are always better than one in combat as they can stay in the game a lot longer.
Unit basing has changed a bit as well, primarily for aircraft. In the previous game, you could simply drop your air units in any province and they would rebase there. Now, you have to build airbases and deploy them where you want your aircraft to station. The same goes for naval bases. Unit basing is unchanged and simply requires you to move to the location in question.
Production also received some tweaking. Production is still run on the same premise; specifically, each unit or object you select requires a certain number of industry capacity points (IC) to build. If they aren’t given their full allocation, the production is slowed or even stopped. In the previous game, the only construction you needed to worry about was in terms of units. All other construction, like factories and infrastructure, were done on a totally separate screen and never affected your industrial capacity. Now, to expand your industry base, you need to use the IC points to make new factories or build new roads. Provincial defensive structures are also handled in this way. On the positive end, you aren’t limited to producing one provincial improvement at a time or having to pick between infrastructure, industry, or defense. As long as the industrial capacity is there, you can keep on building new improvements.
The technology aspect of the game was given a major overhaul. The original title treated research like production; each technology had a certain number of IC points required to run at maximum efficiency. You then converted industry space toward research. That method was highly unrealistic and also allowed larger industrial based countries, like the USA, to possibly develop the entire technology tree in two or three game years and simply dominate over all others. HoI2 handles the research on a more realistic level. Much like in real life, companies are hired to develop new military technology. The game has created numerous people and businesses from the time periods you can hire to develop new technology. They take your money and you wait for the technology to be developed. Some researchers are better than others, so they can research faster but are more expensive. Further, there are historical dates assigned to each technology. So, if you attempt to develop the technology earlier than the historical year, the development time is greatly increased.
Choosing the right company to do the research is also important. Each tech tree item has five sub-sections. Each section has a classification, like aircraft, training, management, industrial, chemistry, nuclear, math, etc. So, picking who researches what is just as important as choosing what to research. Hiring Winchester Repeating Arms to develop an aircraft carrier is asinine. They’ll manage to pull it off, but they’ll take a whole lot longer than the Norfolk Shipping Yards would.
Research management is given further importance as you are only able to run five projects at once, so you’ll need to choose wisely on what you want to research.
The diplomatic side still feels a little tacked on. The results of your decisions are based on your relations with the country in question. You can influence them to help relations or even overthrow them in a coup. You can trade research blueprints or resources with one another. It is all secondary to the game. The more important aspect, though, is how you handle your own nation. Once a year, you are able to adjust your nation’s policies. You can chose political leanings, social policy, level of government economic influence (read: Capitalism vs. Socialism), how your military is trained (draft vs. standing army), and even if you are more warlike or simply happy in isolation. Each policy decision changes how your nation functions. Being more warlike reduces dissent in wartime, and being more isolationist makes it harder to enter war. A capitalist economy brings in more money and makes research easier, but makes research expensive and develops a huge demand for goods, which use up IC. Each decision provides a positive and a negative. There is no one “best” way to set up your policies and politics; each one offers a new set of challenges.
The menu system has been rebuilt from scratch. Hearts of Iron had a highly confusing and complex menu system; many simple commands took five or six menu navigations to get to. Now, everything has been simplified into basic main menus with easy to navigate sub-menus. Nothing ever takes more than three clicks to do. Research requires opening the research tab, selecting the group, selecting the item, and then who does the research. That is as complicated as it ever gets. There is no more digging around for options, and no more confusion for casual gamers. Kudos to Paradox Entertainment for developing a strategy system that is both easy to use and deep with features.
Paradox Entertainment has never been known for its cutting edge visuals or overwhelming graphical abilities. The game still runs on a 2D map. The 2D visuals themselves are very well done. The world is artful, the units are well designed and move around the map with decent animations. All the pictures used in the game, like the research panel and political screens, do a good job of portraying the time period via grainy black and white photographs from the era. The menus are artfully done and get the job done. Still, the minimalist approach to the visuals may turn off some gamers. Luckily, what HoI2 lacks in flashy 3D graphics and effects, it more than makes up for in artistic style (and quality gameplay).
Once again, Paradox Entertainment gives us a powerful musical score to go along with the game. The previous title used classical pieces. This time, the musical score has been doubled in quantity, but also consists of original, fully orchestrated music. Half the scores go along with wartime and the other half with peace. Each score is very well done and is presented in a high quality MP3 format. Sound effects, on the other hand, are almost entirely absent. The music is the centerpiece to the game; everything else is simply to be ignored. There are now 19 new songs added to my iPod lineup, and I’m sure they’ll be played quite frequently.
Game stability is a bit troubled. While not as bad as the previous game, HoI2 still has a tendency to crash once every two game years. It isn’t as painful as crashing shortly after entering the game, but it is still a pain in the rear end. Also, HoI2 suffers from some strange balance issues. It doesn’t happen very often, but from time to time, some strange outcome will occur. The most entertaining one was when Poland annexed Germany in the summer of 1937. Well, there went the entire axis before I even got to enter the war with the USA.
Ultimately, Hearts of Iron 2 proves to be a worthy successor to the original title. Improved in just about every way imaginable, Hears of Iron 2 will not only satisfy the fans of the previous game, but is now set up in such a way to entice an even larger market segment into enjoying the title. Paradox Entertainment has outdone itself with this game and everyone should find the time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
