Classified: France '44

Sadly, I cannot recommend this. I'm not bad by any means at these games, I've played plenty of similar games... But some of the end game missions are beyond impossible, entirely because of RNG. Some missions force you to face upwards of 20 enemies at once, while you have 4. Even if you were more powerful than them, this wouldn't be an easy task... But that's the thing. You aren't. If anything, *they* are more powerful than you. Most of your troop is 2 shot away from getting downed at all times unless you have invested everything you could into armour and health, if there's 20 enemies, they shoot 20 times per turn (often more since some enemies can make others take another turn. Even when behind full cover, it is basically impossible not to take a hit because of the sheer firepower on the enemy side, not to mention grenadiers launch grenades which cannot miss, And snipers are still very likely to hit you. And even if they *do* miss, it doesn't matter, the sheer amount of firepower will supress or break everyone. Meaning you'll either get half of the action points, or none. Every. Single. Turn. And you might be tempted to say, but why not just kill the priority targets? I wish I could. My sniper, fully built for damage, with an amazing rifle, on a crit... Can maybe take half the health of anything that isn't a standard foot soldier. Which doesn't even matter because the enemies have medics which can FULLY HEAL MULTIPLE PEOPLE EVERY 3 TURNS. It takes my entire squad's effort to kill a *single* grenadier, or machine gunner (and forget about officers, since they go down instead of dying), and that's if I'm lucky enough to hit everything. Most of my squad members hit for 2 or 3 damage! I really don't understand where that difficulty spike came from. I went from fighting almost exclusively unarmoured targets which die in one hit to everything, to every single enemy having so much armor and health, a *sticky grenade* to the face doesn't kill... In like two missions! There are strategies to deal with this, I ended up looking at a playthrough of the mission, but the problem is that my situation is wildly different from his simply because of luck. The characters you get are *random*, the weapons you get are *random*, where the gendarmerie decides to be is *random*. And I just so happen to have the gendarmerie on that one mission, which is already incredibly tough (tho it's indicated as standard) The solution to avoid getting overwhelmed is machine gunners, but I only have *one* because the game never gave me the opportunity of getting another. And how many times I can send him on missions without resting is just as RNG since it's only a 50% chance to get tired after a mission. (thanks to the camp discussion mechanic) You cannot ask the player to have specific tools available at all times, if you're making it completely RNG whether or not they have them. You just can't.

I’m a big fan of turn-based tactical games, and this one delivers on many of the things I look for in the genre. Unfortunately, the experience was dragged down by too many frustrating bugs and unfair mechanics. Enemies can sometimes spot you, shoot through walls or doors, and even kill you when they should not have a clear line of sight. I also was not a fan of the mediocre pencil-sketch art style used between missions and on the title screens. Overall, there is a solid tactical game here, but the technical issues and questionable mechanics ultimately ruined it for me.

Loved this game at first but half way through it gets stupidly hard, I put 4 grenades and a sniper shot to put an enemy down. But for atmosphere it is great. Stop making games unnecessarily hard to make the game tedious and boring. This is the first bad review I've given.

The game is a great base. It's a bit overcomplicated ( i still have no idea what's going on on the map because its so chaotic), but the gameplay is very fun. One big issue i have is that when your stealth killing enemies you hit a limit and then the game makes you go loud and alert everyone with an ambush. Its so dumb, why even give the payer the option for stealth kills if you're just going to railroad them into not using stealth. That's like game dev 101. Im really just writing this review in the hopes the devs see this and change how stealth works and fix the map. The map is complete chaos, its definitely the ugliest part of this otherwise solid game. I have no idea whats going on because theres about 15 different things happening and every region is a different color and half of them are highlighted and half arent, its just a complete mess that has no distinction; i just click randomly all over the map until it lets me move forward.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☑ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☑ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

Grabbed this game on sale to finally try it out. After having to restart the tutorial mission due to a movement bug, the game was not up to a good start. After several restarts due to mission breaking bugs, I immediately refunded the game again. Last update was in 2024, so I reckon the game will not be playable in any future anymore. I do not recommend!

To me it feels like a half arsed loveless X-Com reskin. This adds nothing to the genre, it's generic and bland and doesnt appear to be made with love for detail. The meh 3D paintings in the cut scenes, the fact they couldn't even be bothered to hire German speaking voice actors or fundamental things like the cover system. It feels like a bad mixture of arbitrary and random results. You can have a friendly soldier in a trench and another one standing next to them on top of it, and still hit your own guy, despite the fact you're literally standing above him. The other way round the guy on top of the trench AND the one in the trench SOMEHOW get hit by the same bullet. The AI pathfinding is rubbish, the level balancing is a nightmare varying between super boring and borderline unwinable without save scumming. I feel like I can see what this game wanted to do, but the result is boring, mediocre and feels half-arsed.

If you're new to the genre, go play XCOM 2 instead. OK for a few hours, then becomes unecessary tedious. RNG and enemy spawns work against you. UX / UI is clunky and hard to read.

It's a fun game, cross between Commandos and XCom. Replayability is somewhat limited as the second time around the same mission, you already know what to expect. About the WW2 setting, a few minor tweaks could improve era immersion. The dialogues do not sound quite 40's to me, and I think there was a missed opportunity in the faction stores, by putting a mix of random gear of every nationality. I would rather have the radicals (backed by the USSR), have soviet gear in their store, the gaullists witrh american/english gear and the criminal faction supplying all kinds of crazy, cool things.