You can even play as Argentina and invade Paraguay.

All of this detail and complexity may be a dream for micromanagers, but all of the options do not seem to have much of a noticeable effect on the game.  You can research blood transfusions, sub machine guns, and war doctrine tactics, but whether or not you have better equipped medics doesn't seem to have an effect on the outcome of combat.  In fact, the best tactic in the game is to mass your units into huge stacks and have them plod their way through enemy territory.  The AI is not smart enough to counter this, and so there's not really much reason to spend the time moving through the extensive tech tree.

Diplomacy is modeled in the game, and you can spend diplomatic points to persuade countries to your particular line of political thinking.  If you persuade them enough, then you can offer an alliance and have them join your side in the war.  However, even if you persuade some countries to the point that your influence is off the chart, they just won't agree to an alliance.  Even if you pull off a coup in the country and replace its leadership with some lackeys, they still won't join.  Other countries will jump at the chance to enter the war without the need to spend time working on increasing your influence.  Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a correspondence to historical tendencies of the countries - Germany can even sometimes have a tough go of getting Japan to join the Axis, for example.  Diplomacy also seems to take place in a vacuum; you can merrily spend time recruiting the world to your cause and never see any indication that the AI is trying to counter your diplomacy.

The last big issue with HOI is stability.  The game regularly crashes to the desktop, and exhibits all sorts of odd behavior.  Things encountered when playing the game for this review included enemy bomber squadrons based in a captured territory that could not be attacked and disabled options for annexation of countries that were completely conquered and with no remaining units.

HOI is the kind of game that you wish was great.  What strategy gamer wouldn't jump at the chance to replay World War II on a global scale?  However, your reward for spending the time to wade through a clunky and unintuitive interface is a buggy and quirky game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 60%.  The potential for a good game is here, but it sinks under the weight of its flaws.

System Requirements:  Pentium II 300; 64 MB RAM;  2 MB Video RAM; 12x CD-ROM; 120 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

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