Sudden Strike II provides campaigns for each of the five playable nations, Germany, Russia, Britain, Japan, and the US.  The campaigns are the heart of the game, as there are only a handful of standalone missions and no random battle option.  Each is played as a series of missions that require you to achieve a number of objectives to complete the mission successfully.  The game encourages you to use your forces wisely by carrying over units from one mission to the next.  You can play the campaigns in any order, but must successfully complete a mission to unlock the next in the campaign.  The campaigns are set during historical periods of the war, such as the German campaign's setting on the Eastern Front in 1943.  However, they do not seem to follow historical events and battles all that closely - the names are the same, but actual events have been changed to protect the innocent.

The mission quality in the campaign varies, but all are hampered by sometimes confusing and ambiguous mission objectives.  For example, the map will jump briefly to your next objective when it is given, but there is no map marker to help you keep track of where you are supposed to be going.  If you should accidentally click on the map just as it is jumping to the object, you'll be out of luck and just have to guess where you are supposed to be going.  Most of the time your objectives are covered in a pre-mission briefing (accompanied by some of the worst accents ever to appear in a game voiceover), but the map displayed during this briefing looks nothing like the actual game map.

The game also has a mutliplayer component that lets players pick a nation and fight over Zeppelin locations.  Holding a Zeppelin location generates reinforcements, which is a way of simulating the unit production found in most RTS games.  There's not much strategy involved in the multiplayer game - players just throw units at each other to capture the Zeppelins until someone can overwhelm everybody else.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 64%.  Large scale real-time World War II combat is a great idea, but Sudden Strike II falls short in its execution.  Take away all of the World War II units, and you are left with a very average strategy game.

System Requirements:  Pentium II 333;  64 MB RAM;  1 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  500 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

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