I don’t remember how I came into possession of Sudden Strike 4. It was likely through a Steam sale or part of a Humble Bundle. The fact this game had a Total War in WWII vibe is what grabbed my attention.

I had played a little of Company of Heroes before, but it didn’t really grab me. You had to create/recruit soldiers and manage a base, more in the style of Empire Earth. Sudden Strike 4 does away with the resource management aspect in favor of tactics and scenario style levels. It makes the game easier to pick up and play because you don’t have pages of panels to sift through. Much like a Total War game, you order soldiers around a battlefield. Whereas Total War has selection groups broken down to units, Sudden Strike has you select individual soldiers, making most engagements smaller than a typical Total War battle. Each unit has a set of actions you can issue them, such as whether they fire-at-will, defuse a mine, open up a tank hatch, or set firing coordinates for artillery. They are easy enough to access and understand.

You get to command foot soldiers, tanks, mobile artillery, and troop carriers. While you may have different kinds of soldiers: riflemen, machine gunners, submachine gunners, & snipers, I found most of them fought the same. There’s not any gamified variation between the troops, the only unique ones being the medics & mortar men. Armored vehicles have a little more variety and seem to be where the game shines. You have your tanks, armored cars, mobile artillery, & half tracks that all handle a little differently with different advantages. It was an awesome sight to see my row of Shermans rolling across the battlefield.

While some levels allow you to do the basic RTS tactic of “select all units & hit attack” like a Scorched Earth policy, most encourage you to use tactics to complete the mission most effectively. If you have overwhelming firepower, you can get away matching tank for tank, but if you have a squad of infantry, it’s best to hit and run or flank them. When I could, I used my infantry to scout out enemy locations. Soldiers can go prone and hide in tall grass. Once I spotted them, then I'd swing my 2nd group around to catch the enemy in a pincer.

There was a sort of unevenness in the difficulty curve for me. The 2nd level for the Allies is fighting through the bocage, which was a lot of tight corridors and blind spots that saw me lose a lot of soldiers and armor. I ended up playing on easy mode from there on. A few levels later, the Battle of the Bulge was a cake walk since they gave me a huge force of tanks to defend one spot. Then Hurtgen Forest was tough as it was mostly infantrymen going up against German tanks.

Depending on how well you do, you get stars at the end of a level. These serve as upgrade points you can spend at the start of a level. Before you get boots on the ground, you select your commander from a few choice historical figures, like Patton, Montgomery, Zhukov, & Rommel. They are broken down into three categories, Infantry, Armored, and Support. They are self-explanatory, but basically it allows you to boost one factor of your army for the level. There are some good upgrades, but the system is overall moot due to you never know what the right choice is. You get a little flavor of the mission from the briefing screen, but you can’t judge what the makeup of your army for that level will be, mostly tanks? Mostly infantry? And there is a right answer because each mission recaps with a soldier’s journal where he mentions “I’m glad Bradley was leading us” or “Patton did well, but I wonder what our infantry could’ve done with proper instruction”.

The history of the game is a greatest hits of WWII’s European Theater. As an American, I played through the Allied campaign, but there’s a separate campaign for the Soviets, along with the Axis campaign. Each mission starts with a briefing that goes over the history of the battle you’re about to partake in. The levels themselves try to imitate the flow of their actual battles. There’s a codex that gives a bit of history on all the different commanders, vehicles, etc. Thanks to good graphics, the tanks and vehicles all look authentic to their real-life counterparts. There’s also DLC campaigns that cover the Pacific War, North African front, and Dunkirk. They aren’t as long as the main campaign but give a nice insight into the other fronts. You can tell WWII history was a main driving principle of this game.

All in all, this game is a fun WWII, RTS game. It’s not deep or the pinnacle of the genre, but it does everything well. It’s tactical, but captures that feeling of playing with your diecast toys. If you’ve been looking for a Total War: WWII, Sudden Strike 4 is a close imitation.