Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath postulates an alternative outcome to the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In its alternate history, the shooting down of a U-2
over Cuba turned the standoff into a shooting war that started with an American
invasion of Cuba and quickly led to a limited exchange of nukes. While this
certainly is a plausible scenario, the game’s storyline soon becomes
over-the-top and melodramatic and will invoke a little eye-rolling. But who
really plays strategy games for the storyline anyway? The developers wanted an
excuse to create a strategy game with units from the middle of the Cold War and
the story serves that purpose.
The game has four campaigns, one for each of its four factions:
America/England, The Soviet Union, Germany/France (look who’s finally playing
“nice” together), and China. The story in the campaigns is conveyed through
large passages of text and each faction in practice pretty much plays the same
way, so there’s not a lot of personality to the factions. Just pick the one with
your favorite tanks and sully forth.
The campaign is played as a series of scenarios, but they are not structured
as you might expect them to be in a real-time strategy game. Each scenario
presents you with a strategic map of the area that displays the current
locations of your armies, special strategic sites, your ultimate objective, and
any enemy armies within sight. To win the scenario you’ll need to capture the
objective, but how you get there and how many battles that you fight along the
way are up to you. Armies are maneuvered on the map in a turn-based manner and
if you move your army onto an enemy army or strategic site a real-time battle
will ensue. The real-time battles are winner-take-all affairs, with the losing
side paying for their defeat with the complete loss of an army or a strategic
location.
The strategic map also serves as your resource and army management center.
Resources are generated by strategic supply sites and controlling them means
more resources that can be spent on new units to add to your armies or that can
be committed to a battle. Committing resources to a battle ensures that your
units do not run out of fuel or ammo during the fight and is therefore critical
to victory.
The strategic map adds a welcome layer of depth to the game and adds a good
degree of replay value to the scenarios. On the downside the presentation is
pretty Spartan and has a war room map feel to it. On the other hand, the
information given to you about the scenario’s significance to the war and your
objectives is far too verbose and overwhelms you with large reams of text in
very small fonts. I know it sounds crazy, but I prefer to spend my game time
actually playing rather than reading.
When the action moves to a real-time battle things will look very familiar to
anyone who’s played any of the Sudden Strike games before. This is because the
game is from the same developers and they took the Sudden Strike engine into
Cuban Missile Crisis. Unfortunately this means that Cuban Missile Crisis suffers
from the same maladies that plagued Sudden Strike. First of all, pathfinding is
atrocious. Units given orders as a group will split up at the first sign of an
obstacle in their path and begin to scatter across the map. Units will block
each other’s paths and get stuck trying to get around each other. Others will
blindly run across the open in front of enemy positions and happily let
themselves be mowed down. The list goes on, but the gist is that the game is one
of those RTS exercises in unit handholding and babysitting.
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