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TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN IT

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: January 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

OK, its not for everyone. It IS extremely complicated but NOT impossibly so if you take the time to learn it. It was a big time investment for me but it paid off. I LOVE the detail. In real war, strategy is as much about your country's other decisions and capabilities, diplomatic, industrial and scientific. They interplay wonderfully here. I am a realism fanatic and thats why I committed myself to it.

I know those who have only tried to learn this game for an hour are going to be frustrated but I am no genius, and after a (long) afternoon I got the hang of it and after a couple of short try-out games I was doing fine and could sink my teeth into the minutiae. If your reading this and you can keep your attention span high for a day, it IS worth it.

I still wish the AI would be more commen sensical in its decisions. It invades some pretty silly places that historically..well..you just know wouldn't have happened. Same with some declarations of war. But if you can get a game where the AI is being rationale and you have honed your expertise, you will be sucked in.

All those hours gone forever.....:-)

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: March 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

What can I truly say about HOI II other than the fact that this game has eaten up more of my time than most others combined.

The sheer strategic depth is impressive, and on the most difficult setting, starting out as any country you choose in 1936, you can truly re-write history as you go.

Easily modded, the developers did an outstanding job in all the patch releases, it is highly detailed without being overwhelming, and the hard-wired AI events bring some consistency no matter what direction you decide to take Czechoslovakia, Sinkiang, Honduras, or any other country your heart desires.

One of the best strategy games ever released IMHO, have been playing it well over a year, and am still not burned out from it, as every campaign is different. Very much looking forward to the Doomsday expansion/stand alone, which will enhance the tech tree, and push the timeline from HOI II's 1947 up to 1956, so if you really want a challenge, you can now take all the combatants through twenty years of war and diplomacy.

Ignore Raginhood...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 25 / 41
Date: January 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This guy obviously has it out for Paradox and is trying to kill their sales as much as he can by writing negatively biased reviews in the hopes of killing off a sale before it can be made.

Great game for micromanagers

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: October 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is a strategic micromanager's dream, but will be a nightmare for anyone interested in fast-paced action, instant payoffs or easy playability. You have to make decisions in this game, dozens and dozens of them in all sorts of arenas: economic production, technological research, diplomacy, supply consumption, and division-level military command of all your air, naval and land forces, to name the major ones. Some of the effects of these decisions don't develop for years (= hours of playing time), so you have to be patient and a real control freak to enjoy this game. If that's you, and you like open-ended simulations of World War II, then at 20 bucks or less, this game's worth every penny.

Changes from HOI1:

* The interface has been redesigned, making it easier to access certain types of information quickly. You still have to deal with countless message boxes, though, and some things, such as determining the composition, strength and organization of enemy units you are fighting with is a little trickier to deduce.

* The diplomacy model has been revamped, providing more and better options. Paradox scrapped the ambiguous triangle of diplomacy for numerical values that change as you perform various diplomatic actions. Also, international trade now makes sense, as you can negotiate specific deals with specific countries. In my opinion, the diplomacy changes are the best overall improvement.

* The tech tree has been completely redesigned, which has left me a little bewildered since I was thoroughly familiar with the old HOI tree. However, it has been largely simplified, which will make new users and old users happy once they become familiar with it.

* The global map can be broken up into Regions and Areas where you can assign specific units continuous missions. This is handy for ensuring continuous air defense fighter sweeps over your territory, for example.

* There are a host of new commands for military units, particularly naval and air divisions. Also, you can automate naval and air units to perform a continuous mission (such as Air Superiority or Naval Interdiction) in an area for a specified period of time.

* Most significant drawback (IMO): the graphics aren't quite as good as in the last HOI.

Overall, this game is superior to HOI1, mostly because of the vastly improved diplomatic and technological models.

Vast improvement over Hearts of Iron I!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: November 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played and really like Hearts of Iron I, but hated how much time you had to spend micro-managing your economy, your colonies, and your armies. It was fun, but way too tedious.

Hearts of Iron II is still a little tedious, but they made it a lot more simple to control what you do with your economy, and armies. They also improved the tradeing you can do with other countries as well.

I find this new version to be a lot better, and a good and solid game to play.

An iron-laden dud. For the hardcore only...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 33 / 75
Date: February 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Before dismissing my negative feedback out of hand, please consider that i've been an avid wargamer for over 25 years. I've played the original Avalon Hill board games, I've played the low-resolution early computer games like SSI's releases, i've played literally THOUSANDS of hours of Civ, Civ 2, Alpha Centauri, Rome:Total War, etc. etc. etc. I've probably played 50-75% of all historical simulation games ever released on PC.

And I can confidently say: Hearts of Iron is a dud.

One could complain about the intermitten "quit to Windows" crashes (even with the 2.11 patch installed)...

One could complain about the very lame tutorial: There's no way to go back any step in the tutorial; the "next" arrow reverses backwards, etc.

One could complain about the poor graphics: units look like blobs of dung on the board; the sprites move in fitfull bursts; the perspective of the units is bizarre at times.

One could complain about the clunky interface: fixed resolution, a tabbed structure reminiscent of web design in 1998.

But what really kills it is that it's not a fun game. Yes, clearly there is a lot of detail here. But detail is not the same as gameplay.

Hearts of Iron is more accurately described as an attempt to create a model of a historical event. As a model, perhaps it's not a bad one. But modeling history and making a game are very different things.

I'm surprised to see such glowing reviews of this product here. Perhaps there are hardcore players who simply love this level of detail, despite all the other shortcomings of this... er... "game" (sic)? But I think for 90% of the folks buying HOI, they'll be both overwhelmed AND bored by the play (if they can even sort out play from the inept tutorial).

When wargame fans wonder why the market for historical games is so small, why sales figures are so low, why interest in this quadrant of gaming is so lacking... we need only look at the reviews on this website. POOR GAMES like Hearts of Iron are lauded by reviewers, even though they stink. Without insisting that playability for historical games be THE salient issue, the wargame market will continue to be small and beset by failures.

Hearts of Iron, while clearly a fantastic research and modeling project, is a terrible game. To call it a "game" is misleading, really.

A dumbed down version of HoI

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 33
Date: January 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

OK, they finally fixed some of the numerous bugs from the original HoI (which is easily the lowest quality commercial software that I have ever seen - and I've seen a lot), migrated some others into HoI2 and introduced some new ones. Anyone considering buying it should take into account that it is a very different game than HoI since Paradox made a concious decision to target a different (and supposedly much bigger) market segment. Surely, there's a big overlap with HoI fan base, but many people who love HoI hate HoI2 and vice versa. Compared with HoI, complexity of HoI2 has been vastly reduced, all major countries now have identical military units with the same combat stats, and the game is sharply focused on ground combat (which can now be reliably won only through sheer numbers) - there's simply nothing else to do for the player (research is almost an afterthought and the player has very little control over air and naval units) with the notable exception of a new trade system.

***TWO NEW PARAGRAPHS***

As I played HoI2 for some time, I discovered that it had even more bugs than I originally thought (even though I downloaded the patch). Combined with some very inconvenient features of the interface, this makes the game almost unplayable unless you can play it in very long sessions. However if you just play an hour now and an hour then, be advised that the state of the game is not saved accurately when you save the game, so every time you reload you have to waste a lot of time just restoring your settings (you literally may need hundreds of mouse clicks just to adjust your industrial capacity allocations - and Paradox could have easily fixed that proplem in just a few minutes by saving these settings accurately rather than rounding them off). Just as about any other Paradox game, HoI2 was clearly not ready for release and I would advise anybody considering the game just to wait for a year or so - there will be several more patches by then and the game will most likely be sold cheaper as well.

Furthermore, when I complained about bugs on their forum, I got banned. OK, if they don't want their product's defects to be mentioned on their own website that's fair enough (although that "customer service" is quite heavy-handed and normally a paying customer expects a very different reaction). But even worse, they now do not allow me to not only post anything, but even READ the forum. This is really mean, considering that the forum contains a lot of FAQs and explanations, while the manual does not explain many important things about the game and in fact both the manual and in-game tips refer the player to the Paradox forum as a source of further information. So I would advise everybody to beware of Paradox.

Gets old too quickly

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 33
Date: September 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing this game for a week now, and I already got bored of it. There's not really much to do, only this:

Make Operation Barbarossa succed playing Germany.

Take the Suez cannal as Germany.

Build a nuclear bomb and nuke your enemy (As any country)

That's it. You will find that the rest of the game consists of buiding units and fighting. There's no way to deal with your population, no social options, so the game consists 100% of fighting. Not fun when you play the 1936 scenario and have to wait three years for the war to start.

The incompetent AI makes everything worse. I never had to build the Atlantic Wall when I was playing Germany, because the allies never attempt to land in France, or in any other place. The only thing the americans do in the game is wipe the floor with your navy and bomb your units. They don't even bomb your industry. Not fun. The Italians get kicked out of N Africa and that's where it ends, because they never try to invade Italy and force it to surrender. It seems that the AI is not interested in fighting the war.

The same with the Soviets. No matter how much you suck at strategy, you will always win. It's strange but true. I'm a complete newbie at this, but all I did was attack them where they have the smallest number of units and without a challenge I reached Moscow in some months. They don't try to counter attack. I was looking a tough challenge, but increasing the difficulty only makes your units fight worse, even in Very Hard/Furious the Americans will never do a D-Day.

There's no espionage stuff either. Forget about using commandos or that sort of stuff.

The bottom line is, the only fun of this game is making the genocidal maniacs win (How fun!), which is ridicously easy, and, well... Not much else. It's a bit interesting to see some what-if scenarios too, like the Checz fighting, the Republicans winning the Spanish civil war and etc. You have the option to give control of territories to nations like the Wallonians, Croats, Slovaks, Serbians, almost every country in the world, which can be fun (when you are extremely bored).

I was interested at first at playing my country, Argentina, and try to make it intervene in the war. Not possible. Every country except the big ones (Germany, Japan, USA, England, France, etc) doesn't have any industrial capacity. Have fun trying to get your industry off the ground. Maybe this could be solved by allowing the mentioned countries to give industrial assistance to the smaller ones, i.e building their industry, but such thing is not possible.

Rainy day? Bored like hell? Go and buy it. Have 2 hours of fun resisting as Finland against the Soviet Union, making the Ardennes Offensive or Operation Sealion succed. There's not much else you can do with this game. Wait till the price drops a little or you'll feel dissapointed.

Fantastic - Detailed - Obsessive Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: January 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

All sense of reality will disapear while playing this game. Immersive is an understatement. I fell asleep running through scenarios that would allow me to resupply my 12 divisions in Moscow. (I pushed a little far into Russia hoping to force a quick capitulation - mistake #1).
HOI 1 was great this game fixes most of the mistakes and is just as much fun as the first one. I can't wait until the CORE mod is available for this version!

Well what can i say

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: January 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

some will complain about the graphics, its true the graphis are poor, but the game has never aimed at good graphics, how can it compete in budget with the big guns.
Some will say the sound is weak. I agree i could be worked on but when it works it influences your playing style and you don't get annoyed with it it fits in mostly or you get used to it.
Some will say the the game has a steep learning curve. It does but the game also has near infinite playability. And the learning curve is still fun especially in the scenarios or playing co-op with people online
some say it is the same as hoi, it looks similar yes and while you get used to it it is but the game is much updated and i would have payed 2* as much for this game.
the movement is attack works tremendously making you feel brilliant when you perform a pinser movement and trap the whole enemy army:)

But if you do not like to have to concentrate hard in computer games, or prefer much more graphically adept games this is not for you,( my other favourite game is call of duty united offensive) otherwise why havent you already bought it.

Sorry just thinking the flaw i get annoyed with most is the early campaigns can take hours before the war, which for me is dull,only researching building, trading and influencing other countries, i would have prefered an extra speed setting.

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