War in the East 2 is a nice and most detailed (but deeply flawed in many aspects) depiction of Eastern Campaign of the main war in human history.
1 The game boasts of listing every Soviet, Italian and Romanian division and even obscure battalion. Patches still appear correcting the 667th anti-aircraft battalion in Grozny. Great accuracy? BUT. Soviets officially mobilized 14 million men by the end of 1941, while the game accounts for only about 5 million. Ten thousand battalions missing...
2 The same pattern appears with leaders. Hundreds (!) Soviet, German and Italian generals painstakingly evaluated by many parameters — morale, infantry and mobile mastery, political, and so on. Impressive? BUT, in one obscure post, support admitted that years ago the developer nullified the combat impact of these values, leaving only initiative. This change was never made public, never reflected in the game UI, never published in the 1000-page manual, Living Manual, or the patch notes. Dozens of manual pages that you should study meticulously detailing distance, chain of command on these values - irrelevant for many years.
3 Weapon and vehicle modelling follows the same logic. Every AFV is given fuel consumption, production value, front, side and top armor — great on paper. When I looked at actual battle resolution, however, the picture changed completely. I tool the PaK 36 “doorknocker” against the T-34, and saw penetration barely falls with distance (perhaps 1 % instead of the historical 7 %). The system also treats every AP round as hitting the armor plate exactly perpendicular (90 degrees). As a result, a PaK 36 with a point-blank penetration of 50 mm goes through the 48 mm turret side of a T-34 at 800 m every time. The gun not only shoots effectively 5–7 times farther than it should, it hits about 15 times harder. But there is more. Very rare sub-calibre rounds that historically penetrated 90–100 mm only at point-blank range become effective at any distance against any front/side armor and at any angle (remember, angle is always strict 90 here - nice historical modelling), because range loss almost does not apply to them either. The game also claims to model the “damage” of every gun and the “damage resistance after penetration” of all AFVs, well, subcaliber rounds ALSO hit with full force of normal round. Result - Pak36 swats T34 by dozens like flies.
After seeing this, one has to wonder whether showing dozens of parameters for every AFV and plane is worth it, where a super-simple but correctly working system of “1 tank = 1 plane = 3 guns = 10 soldiers” might have produced clearer and more historical results.
4 The same disconnect appears inside squads. The game models every weapon, but their actual usage defeats logic. 10 flamethrowers in a dedicated squad work significantly worse than a single flamethrower. The machine gun — the main weapon of any infantry squad in WW2 — inflicts much less damage than it should. Until the last update, the hundreds of anti-tank guns organic to a division did practically nothing. Most elite German mechanized infantry also did practically nothing. Meanwhile some weapons, such as 85 mm AA guns, enter a “berserk” mode and kill hundreds of targets per barrel.
5 Weather is one of the strongest parts of the game (there were some river-freezing bugs, corrected recently, but overall it is about perfect).
6 Terrain and movement systems are also excellent for this type of game. BUUT The problem is that they are too complicated - for the game’s own AI. As soon as you raise AI difficulty above 100–110 %, the famous “teleport” behavior of enemy units starts.
7 Production, heavy industry, armaments, resources and oil are modelled in great detail, with different costs for producing every piece of equipment and tens of pages of weekly reports and graphs. Historically I even hope these systems are close. Big BUT. In practice they are completely irrelevant. In 99 % of games neither side ever faces a real shortage of armaments, resources, heavy industry, fuel or oil. Perhaps the Germans experience it in 1945 when they are already losing everything — and 98 % of games never reach that stage. Even oil, the famous “ticking bomb” for Germany, eventually runs low, if Baku is not captured, but everyone confirms that somehow game mechanic twists it so, that life continues: planes still fly and tanks do not stop. So, at best, a flavor where you expected substance.
8 Information, tables and numbers throughout the game are extremely murky and often contradictory, both in the in-game displays and in the manual. I sooo want to support the game; perhaps this can even be construed as historical — Stalin and Halder and their generals almost certainly received plenty of unclear and inconsistent information and had to make sense of it somehow.
9 Above was strictly objective, this is my personal preference - strictly historical in the worst way (and in my view the most unhistorical) part is the reinforce–disband–theatre transfer system. In real life Stalin disbanded tank divisions that had lost their tanks and infantry divisions reduced to 500 men.
In the game, even if you carefully preserve your tank divisions and prevent your infantry from being encircled, they are still disbanded on the same historical dates as the beaten Soviet divisions of 1941 or 1943. The game forces you to replay the exact photograph of the war; no real freedom is allowed.
You may place every German division in the Crimea if you fancy, but you cannot create a single extra support battalion, nor can you spend admin points to produce an additional 100 anti-tank guns.
10 Production works the same way: whether the Germans take Moscow and Leningrad or somehow end 1941 fighting in Poland, all historical German vehicle/manpower production continues unchanged.
11 The “behind-the-map” theatres are even more rigid. Germany loses in Africa no matter what. The Allies invade and occupy Western Europe up to Berlin no matter what. You can triple the number of divisions and aircraft in the West — history still follows the textbook. The same is true for Norway, the Balkans and Italy. At best you receive ±1 admin point, and even that is unlikely for secondary theaters. For the Soviets the pattern is identical: if you strip the Far East of every division in July and still lose Leningrad and Moscow by August, Japan never intervenes — simply because in the real events of 80 years ago they chose not to.
12 Small interface problems add to the frustration. The game consistently shows 4 hits out of 100 as 40 hits out of 100 (0.04 displayed as 0.4) in battle reports. Tables cannot be sorted properly: they sort by month first and only then by year, making it impossible to, say, follow the historical progression of German, Soviet or Italian equipment entering service.
13 Division TOEs show the same photographic rigidity. This level of detail is brilliant. BUT, even if you avoid the great encirclements and still possess plenty of anti-tank guns and artillery, you STILL receive the weak "stopgap TOEs" — because that is what Stalin was forced to do after his losses. There is no logic for this in your situation, but the game follows the textbook no matter what.
14 I will not repeat after many others that 1000 pages manual covers maybe 50%? And you may guess another 15%, after that 35% is save-load-try... Which was fine for 1986 game maybe, but in 2026 to spend hours and hours to test system by system, trying to gauge how it really works - not helped by that the game is SLOW, 1 test turn (2 air resolutions and 2 land resolutions) can easily take 30-40 minutes.
