Thornberry

Tl;dr: Wonderful historical setting complemented by solid gameplay, and speech recognition that ACTUALLY WORKS. Visuals could use more polish, and occasionaly buggy messages. Pros: The historical photos, videos and documents are WONDERFUL. I love the propaganda-ey narrator. The gameplay is simple, but quite engaging. Flanking, digging in, finding lost units is fun, and most missions appear to have several possible approaches. Leveling up and renaming units is fun so far, I like the idea of leadership personalities, but some of them don't seem that important (what does camouflage even do?). Cons: The visuals are strictly OK - could've used more polish. Voice-acting is generally good, but sometimes sounds stilted. Summary: This game is a rough gem with lots of love put into it, but it's obvious Radio Commander had more visual polish.

Coming from a fan who's played 1000's of hours of Warcraft 3, my disappointment can't be understated. I started up the prologue campaign, and was immediately booted to a defeat screen. Twice in a row. After restarting, I finally got into a game, and when I pressed the menu button, the screen went dark, no menu appeared, and I was stuck. I had to alt+f4. The game is literally unplayable. I got a refund. I sincerely hope within the next 6 months it's patched to satisfaction. If so, I will happily repurchase and re-review it.

Tl;dr: Cool idea, bad execution. This is too bad, as I was really looking forward to this one. Pros: Decent visuals. Map and menus are nice. Panning around the base is cool. Mission intro videos are nice. I enjoyed the non-important banter with your units. Cons: There's a ton, but let's skip to the important one: gameplay is boring. Ask where a guy is. Make sure they're still fighting. Fast-forward. Repeat. Super boring and repetitive. The radio aspect just masks an inherently shallow strategy game where nothing matters more than just constantly sending all of your guys to overwhelm the single enemy. Also just repeatedly call in artillery and helos. There's just no heart to this; it feels brain-dead and boring. The voice-acting is super stilted. You can obviously tell when they're playing the next audio clip, and this is SUPER apparent when they report status (which is what you're doing 70% of the time). Summary: They put no thought or effort into the gameplay. Yup you talk to your guys over the radio, but this just masks an incredibly shallow experience. Look elsewhere for your realism itch.

One of the greatest RTS games ever made. Eschewing classic base-building, COH delivers tense tactical gameplay set in a mostly destructible map. Asymmetric maps and a strong online community make this one for the ages.