The Russians lose a tank.

Blitzkrieg is made more difficult by that bane of real-time strategy games, pathfinding issues, as well as occasional AI breakdowns.  Losing your support vehicles often means losing a battle, but keeping them safe is not an easy task.  They seem to have a strong propensity to take the most dangerous path to reach the vehicles that they are supposed to resupply.  On numerous occasions I've carefully maneuvered supply vehicles to a position where a simple beeline would bring them to the vehicles in need, only to have them decide to take a roundabout route past a nest of AT guns.  Needless to say they never made it to where they were needed and I had to restart the mission for lack of ammunition.  You can also expect to be forced to carefully walk any group of units to their destination, especially with a mix of unit types, if you want them to stick together and end up where they need to be.  Should you forget to specify aggressive movement for your units, they'll walk straight into withering fire until they are mowed down to the  last man.  Even infantry awaiting orders are not smart enough to go to ground when taking artillery fire.  The net result of all of this is that it is darn near impossible to play missions in real-time since you have to keep a constant eye on all of your units spread around the map.

Graphically, the game looks better than most games in the genre.  Blitzkrieg is partially 3D in that the units are modeled in 3D as are the maps.  This allows units to enjoy 360 degree facing, independent turret movement, and to use elevated terrain to their advantage.  The units are also nicely detailed allowing you to easily differentiate between the different types of vehicles, although you won't necessarily be able to identify all of the 200 plus vehicle variants appearing in the game on sight.  The engine is not fully 3D though, so you don't have full camera control and will play the game from the standard isometric camera angle familiar to strategy gamers.

Blitzkrieg is not a bad game - it can be enjoyable if you don't mind taking the missions at a slow pace and have patience with its more frustrating aspects.  It's really a niche product that will appeal to those who like games that sit on the boundary between war games and real-time strategy games.  Its broader appeal is hurt by the fact that it will seem too slow and difficult for many people, and war gamers will probably find that the game is not quite realistic enough for their tastes and e frustrated by the lack of a full scenario editor.  What good are 200 plus units if you can't use them to create the exact order of battle for your favorite battles?

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 74%.  Blitzkrieg has its challenging and enjoyable moments, but it has its share of problems too.

System Requirements:  Pentium II 366;  64 MB RAM;  8 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  2.4 GB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

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