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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.

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.

Erratic AI, do not buy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 22
Date: January 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game has many great features, particularly interface and historical detail (including individual leaders and weapon types) that easily get you addicted. However the diplomatic aspect is terribly erratic, which totally spoils the game. After playing a grand campaign as Germany and doing extremely well in Europe, I saw Japan ally with me, then make peace with China and surrender all of the territory it had captured, then declare war on the US and China (again) the next day from a much worse military position. When you have spent a week practically glued to the screen to play a historical strategy game, you don't want to see such an ahistorical event any more than you want to see Martians invade Normandy. The designers really have to work on the diplomatic aspect to make this game satisfactory.

Wow! this really sucks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 58
Date: June 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is impossibly complicated. What a useless game. You are better off just watching some tv or going for a walk at the park than trying to play this abomination of micromanagement. What a waste. I want to throw up. And I wish I could have my money back. Dont buy this garbage.

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.

War's difficult in the real world - and now on your computer

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 25 / 35
Date: April 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

A while back, when "Victoria" (one of my favorite Paradox Entertainment games, incidentally) was released and did not meet as high sales as expected, the head of Paradox declared that in the future PE would try not to make any more games that were overcomplicated. Now they have released the sequal to "Hearts of Iron." (yet again, a Paradox game I liked) All I have to say is...

What was that about not making games complicated?

I really want to love this game. Some parts that were lacking in HoI have been fixed here, with a better diplomacy system (you don't have to annex a whole nation, just sign a peace deal to get a certain amount of provinces) and better trade system. (you can now directly trade with nations, not just deal with the aggravating "World Market") And yet, it isn't as much fun to play as HoI. Even with these improvements, there will be plenty to frustrate the player.

For one, the interface system has gone to hell. Maybe it's just that there are way too many buttons to click. For example, to see the stats of a battle you must click on the province...and THEN on a button that appears showing you what sides are fighting. Was this really necessary? In the older Paradox days, all one had to do was click on the units fighting and then you saw the battle unfolding. I see no problem with this system. And any one who got a headache in Victoria's economic system will get an anerism with HoI2. Instead of simplifying resources or editing the existing ones from HoI, Paradox has ADDED some! Among these is energy, which I don't fully understand. ("Hey France, how much for 5 kilowatts?") Thankfully resources you are not producing enough on will be in red so you can tell which you have to balance out, but it is still annoying to try and trade with nations around the world just to get several different kinds of materials.

And, of course, there are loads of bugs in the game. As usual are the Crash-To-Desktops (CTD's) that plague most of Paradox's games. There also odd bugs where units that don't exist any more will be kept on the map, a ghost army still retreating. I've also noticed some of my armies seem to disappear - and no I don't mean they're depleted in battle or lost to attrition, I mean one moment they're there and the next they're gone.

Paradox needs to seriously get its act together in the pre-release of it's games. Most succesful companies will test their games again and again, making sure they are complete and without the most obvious bugs before releasing them onto the market. Blizzard Entertainment pushes back many of it's game releases, but when they do release them they are in high quality and most of all they are COMPLETE. Paradox needs to stop this game of releasing half-finished games full of bugs and then saying, "Awe gee, where did we go wrong?" when the games do not sell as well as they should. I also find it aggravating that many fixes are done by the gamer's themselves. Many times I look at what is done by the people of Paradox's forum, and I wonder why THEY aren't paid.

I know a lot of people like this game, and maybe I'm just speaking an isolated opinion, but I was not all that impressed with the sequal. There were many potentials with this game, but sadly they are outnumbered by the shortcomings. I would suggest buying this game when it's fairly cheap, because it might not be worth your money.

Oh HOI, I loved not wisely but too well

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 22 / 27
Date: January 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ok, first off the caveats: i LOVED hoi1 (the previous version of this game). Though not without its flaws, it was a masterful war game and an intruiging industrial/technology simulation system. That game kept me going for around a whole year or more once the CORE modifications came online.

Naturally I was eager to see what lay in store in HOI2. Having some days off work I played for around a week solid (the wife was away, I swear), and I thought (and think) Paradox did a great job with much of it. Air and sea missions are much more realistic, though still IMO not quite right. Production, trade, and diplomacy are generally excellent. And the new move-is-attack system is in some ways great. Convoys and supply are vastly improved.

And (amazingly for Paradox) the game was pretty bug free and their usual fantastic support had a patch out a couple of days after release as well.

But... after 2-3 weeks of occasional play I am bored.

Maybe it's the passing of a youthful crush and the old passion just isn't there any more. Maybe HOI2 wasn't as experimental as I hoped once we got intimate... but the love is gone, dude.

Gripes and complaints:
1. The tech system; it sucks. Very little variety and the only interesting strategic technology choices (doctrines) are made already if you are a major power. All units are the same, and concentrating on a particular tech sector (i.e. specialization) is severely discouraged due to every tech having an assigned 'year'. I confess I like the fact you can assign tech teams to specific technologies even if it's a bit hokey. But there's no way to use anything to 'speed' important research.
2. Units. Due to the tech system, all units basically feel the same. The old feeling of "I might have crummy infantry, but my tiger IIs will save the day" never happens.
3. Resources. The battle for resources (partly, I admit due to a much better trade system) never really happens as a major power. No incentive to invade the Caucasus for that oil. Oil refinement and resource management technolgies are mostly irrelevant.
4. AI. Ok, ok I know AI is very difficult, and HOI2 does a fair job, but still... it's fairly basic. No different from HOI1 in general.
5. Leaders. Some unrealistic decisions about leaders have been made. All leaders die on their historical date of death. So rommel's death in 1944 happen no matter what. Since the inherent logic of the game is to change the historical events somehow, it breaks the game logic that characters should die the same day they did in real life - because in general the game history will have been entirely different that the real history.

I'd love to give this game 3.5 stars, but I can't. It's better than average, in fact it's pretty unique apart from its predecessor, and especially if you never played HOI1 you'll probably love it. Also the user mod community is extremely strong so expect a very different, and much improved game to emerge soon enough. But i just can't shake the feeling they've taken a lot of the flavor out... but then again I'm just set in my ways and given to moaning about how great things used to be and how everything's gone to the dogs anyway.

My advice: get the game if you know other Paradox games, but wait for the major mods to be out before you do so.

HOI 1 or HOI 2?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 16
Date: January 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The sequel of the best WW2 strategy game to date arrived. Anyone that bought HOI 1 in the past might have realised though that the game was not worth much until excited owners that saw great potential in the game system begun to modify the basic programme. The best attribute of Paradox games is that they could be almost fully customisable by owners and these modifications made by independent communities are in fact shared freely in several websites (e.g. make a quick search for CORE and Stony Road). In fact thanks to those modifications HOI 1 became rapidly a huge success being at the moment the best WW2 simulation to date (this is currently including HOI 2 I am afraid).

Unfortunately from several HOI 1 veterans that already own HOI 2 the general critic is that the pure vanilla game (without customers programme modifications -non Paradox related- which because the game is newly released they do not seriously exist just yet) the game is not worth much and it is easy to see how disappointed they are.

My suggestion to the people that own HOI 1 is to continue using it together with the custom mods (it took more than two years to evolve to where we stand now with the game and I can assure the result is awesome) and wait to buy HOI 2 until the veteran community begin to release the game corrections and modifications (Paradox is also famous for their bugs and terrible graphics although as I said almost everything can be improved with time by the customer community and it will be). This will take minimum 2 to 3 months which means that if you are desperate to get the game you should wait until around April 2005 if we are lucky to have the initial serious attempts. If you have never played HOI in the past I would go for the first version of it which should be at least half the price and together with the free downloadable mods it is better than the current HOI 2. Again I would expect that with time and the help of the HOI community this will be reverted and as an added bonus HOI 2 will also be much cheaper without having to pay the release price.

Not Historical

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 38
Date: May 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you are looking for an interesting war game you may like this one. If your looking for a historical accurate game look elsewhere.

Production, Research,Technology,ect., ect.,

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: January 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Just too much to do, to fight world war 2. The United States War College should put this in their curriculum. I like the concept but very, very, complicated to play. It is for the die hard world war 2 strategist.

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