Hearts of Iron (HOI) is a grand strategic game of World War II that puts
other strategy games to shame in terms of scope. The entire globe is
divided into territories, and while many World War II games have let you command
forces in Western Europe and the South Pacific, not many have let you do both
... and also let you open up a front on the Indian subcontinent if you wanted.
HOI is a sequel of sorts, being built upon the Europa Universalis games.
However, it is not simply Europa Universalis with aircraft. Paradox has
added significantly more depth to the game with a complex and very detailed
research and technology component, generals and government ministers, and
coordinated attacks. Unfortunately all of this depth has come at the cost
of complexity, and HOI's interface is not quite up to the task.
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| Germany moves in on Austria in 1936. |
The in-game tutorials only cover the basics of play and the manual is
inconsistent, so many gamers will find the game overwhelming when they first sit
down to play. As soon as things get started you'll be bombarded by pop-up
status messages informing you of every minute event occurring in the game.
Even an army moving to an adjacent friendly territory generates a pop-up
message. If the game speed is set to a faster speed, the screen will
literally fill up with dozens of messages. The messages also appear in a
log at the bottom of the screen, so it is a mystery why every event needs a
pop-up message as well. The game will begin with the tedious process of
right-clicking on each class of message and specifying that it should not appear
in a pop-up window. An options menu allows you to go through all of the
types of messages and specify whether it should be displayed or not, but there
is no way to select multiple messages - you need to turn off the dozens of messages
individually.
The game is filled with such interface issues. For example, when deploying
newly available troops you need to scroll through a long list that combines
available units with those still under construction. There is no way to
sort units by type or status. When you find a unit that is ready for
deployment, you need to click on a green colored territory. This is not
mentioned in the manual or specified in the tutorial, and if you click on a
territory of a different color, you are taken to that territory's production
screen without any message informing you why your selection was invalid.
Why are there messages when a unit moves to a new zone but none for invalid
orders? Furthermore, once you figure out how to deploy units (not that
you'll necessarily understand why some territories are OK for deployment while
others or not, or why these territories are different for different units) the
list will scroll back to the top. As an example, at the start of the 1939 scenario
Germany has a lot of naval units in production and a number of army units ready
to deploy. Right at the start of the game you're stuck with a long cycle of scrolling down to the army
units, looking for green territories, clicking on one, returning to the list and
scrolling down, etc. An auto-deploy option or support for multiple
selection would have been nice, to say the least.
If you're looking for a quick-fix of world domination or making the world
safe for democracy, then this game is not for you. HOI requires a lot of
dedication to figure out just how to manage all of the research options,
economic sliders, generals and cabinet ministers, and diplomatic options.
The game progresses in real-time, but there is so much to keep track of that
you'll spend most of the time with the game paused. The lack of global
setting controls or a single interface for managing territories means that you
need to click through each territory one by one to manage it. The US alone
is divided into 30+ territories, so you can imagine how much work this involves.
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