"We're Going to War"

As maniacal as Armand Assante looked when he said that line in Judge Dredd, he was nothing compared to Hitler. Hitler set the scene for and then started World War 2. In addition to the countless millions of military casualties, the material losses and so on, there was the cost in lives of the innocents. Now every war has civilian casualties, but never before were civilians targetted in such an explicit way. Whether it's the fire-bombing of Dresden, the London Blitz, or the Nazi concentration camps (which, in addition to Jews, had many other Eastern European victims), the loss of civilian life was huge. Yet now that the wounds have healed and memory has started the fade, Hitler has become the greatest possible villain in any game or movie. After all, it would seem inconceivable that any man or woman would ever get hell-bent on destroying everyone in his path (literally), but there he was.

Looks like a nice enough place to live.

Hey wait, what's the army doing here?

With time, it has even been possible to separate Hitler from the war. There have been wargames that focus exclusively on the military aspects. Eventually a game was made in which the entire, exclusive point was to conquer the world for Germany, an unthinkable idea 20 years ago. Panzer General broke the last taboo, by bringing German world conquest in World War II to the mainstream. With that gone, a flurry of strategy games about WWII followed - from Steel Panthers to Panzer General 3D. These were accompanied by a massive amount of WWII flight sims, a naval combat sim and a pair of tank sims. It seems that everything was in place for a World War II gaming renaissance.

There's Something Missing

Yes, there was something missing. While there was no doubt about the amount of turn-based strategy games available, there wasn't a single RTS based on WWII. In fact, the only game to ever come close to a WWII RTS was Command and Conquer: Red Alert, which was hardly based on historical facts.

Tanks? This is not good...

Invasion!

Enter Sudden Strike, a WWII RTS published by German publisher CDV and developed by an undisclosed group. Any comparisons to a C&C or WarCraft type of game should go right out of the window. The closest game in existence that can compare to Sudden Strike is Myth.

In case no one remembers, Myth was the excellent RTS from Bungie that broke them out of the Mac market and into PCs. Totally avoiding the resource aspect, Myth started you out with a bunch of units, gave you a goal and left it up to you to get things done. Sometimes you'd encounter more troops of your own, or get reinforcements, but that's it.