I do not have kids but I am an old enough man to be A Dad, which is to say I spent a substantial part of this weekend waking up at 6am, singing a little song about “going to the hardware store,” dealing with A Project that spiraled out of control, going to two different hardware stores (so I didn’t lose cred at the first one by admitting I had been wrong of course), looking thoughtfully at lawnmowers despite living in an apartment and not having a lawn to mow, and perusing yard sales because it was a holiday weekend and A Nice Day To Drive Around. My youth was filled with Tom Clancy potboilers, technothrillers, and RUSSIANS COMING THROUGH THE FULDA GAP. Which is a long roundabout way (dad story!) of saying Eugen Systems makes games for me personally and I was very excited to get the chance to play Warno.
WARNO
Developer: Eugen Systems
Price: $40 USD
Platform: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Warno is the spiritual successor to the Wargame series and is an upper-tier Dadgame set in an alternate history where the coup against Gorbachev succeeds, conflict is imminent, and said Rooskies are definitely coming through said Fulda Gap. Warnois a combination of a turn-based board game where you move your units around at a strategic level and frown at things like action points and zones of control–yes, one of those war games–paired with a tactical level real time strategy mode where said units go to battle against each other in the forests, fields, and towns of alt-80s Germany.
Now I want to be clear when I say “real time strategy,” I don’t mean “lasso a gaggle of things and click” because this isn’t that kind of game and you will lose. Eugen makes games for hardcore weirdos. You may feel comfortable when the first tutorial covers things like “here is how we move the camera and order units around,” but I encourage you to go to the next tutorial which covers line of sight and camouflage and how terrain and buildings obstruct views. Zerg rush, this ain’t. No, my friend, this is one of those hardcore wargames where you care about camouflage and unit positioning and facing and initiative and unit cost, in real time. It’s what Eugen does. In the second tutorial you will meticulously guide your lightly armored Humvees around Soviet armor while monitoring their line of sight and camouflage or they will destroy you. You’re not even playing the actual game part yet.
On the battlefield, it’s not just about having dudes in a certain area. Instead, it’s about controlling certain zones with your forces, driving out enemy forces, and seizing strategic objectives. As time passes, this awards you command points you can use to deploy more units, summon more resources from off map, and otherwise gain more power…but that can also make the battlefield more chaotic. So there’s a resource cost to pushing forward, abstracted but there, and also a reward for conquest and a reason to not turtle up and play defense. Everything winds up being a war of maneuver, but the two sides play very differently, and even the different nations play differently.
Your NATO forces cover the Good Germans and Americans and British and whatnot and they tend to be better quality troops and have better quality units, but there are fewer of them, so you usually wind up playing a counterpunching, “hit em where they ain’t” game, often using your advantages in airpower and forcing them to respond to your advances rather than sitting pretty and letting the superior Warsaw Pact numbers grind you down. PACT forces are your Evil Germans, the USSR, and various Eastern European countries. Their troops and gear aren’t as good, but there are a lot more of them, and you usually wind up playing them by poking around the capitalist pigdogs for weaknesses, then hurling a bunch of dudes into the weak areas and exploiting that advantage while they’re trying to react. Even if you play the same campaigns and same battles and same side, things often feel very different depending on how the battle breaks.
This is the kind of game where it may take you a couple days to play through the tutorials. (You’ll want to play through the tutorials). And even then, they’re useful and you need to play them, but you’re still going to blunder around a lot. There’s a difference between “learning to order your tank to fire on that other tank” and “figuring out what to do when your recon spots an enemy tank platoon entrenched on a hill but your artillery is reloading and the enemy has air control but you just got enough command points to order your anti-aircraft units to deploy but it’s going to take em a few minutes to get in position but do you want them to protect the artillery or do you want them upfront protecting your line units?”
What’s great is there’s also just plain a lot of game here: there’s Army General mode. There’s Skirmish mode where you can play a scenario. You can build out custom battlegroups to fight with. There’s multiplayer where you can play everything from 1v1 to 10v10, which is probably the closest you will ever come to actually being an army officer without actually being an army officer. Eugen has a map editor which is currently in alpha in the build I played. Mod support is planned.
As someone who has played a lot of war games and played a lot of Wargame, Eugen is one of those companies like Paradox that has always felt like they are building towards something. Warno feels like their magnum opus, the war game they have been trying to build since the beginning. It isn’t easy to understand by any means, but it is very good, very playable, and more importantly…well, let me run through this:
In one game, I was defending an area with three bridges across a river.
I went “Okay, they probably aren’t going to be able to secure all three bridges at once”, so I deployed small recon and blocking forces to all three. My right flank seemed fairly quiet so I threw most of my forces at that bridge.
My small teams on the center and left got wiped out but I managed to secure my right flank and get an armored cavalry team of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles across the river, meaning I had a toe hold on both sides of the river. I knew they’d figure it out eventually, so I fortified that position with artillery, infantry, anti-air, and more tanks and Bradleys. They did counterattack, but in dribs and drabs that let me build up some strength on both sides of the river.
From there, I started to advance on both sides of the river towards the center bridge, using my recon Bradleys as scouts. Whenever they saw a communist, they’d call in heavy artillery and the tanks would drive up and open fire. The Soviets had advanced aggressively across the bridge…which was great, actually. I threw a ton of armor at the far side of the river, confronting them with a dilemma: they could either ignore it and I’d cut their supply lines or make their supply trucks have to drive a lot farther, or they’d have to try and fight back across the same goddamn bridge they’d just fought across.
They tried to fight back across the bridge, but a column of tanks in single file is easily destroyed by a line of tanks supported by artillery and, by this point, air power. In the meantime, I brought up supporting forces on the near side of the river, so they were getting hammered from both sides. Point captured. I repeated the process on my left, turning the battle into a Total Victory.
If you read all that…first of all, thank you, but if you went “I understood none of that, that is the most boring thing I’ve ever read,” then this probably isn’t your kind of game. If you said, “That sounds like the most amazing thing I have ever heard,” then you can do all that and more in Warno.
The Final Word
Peak Dadgame
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
