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| Send in the spies! |
Hearts of Iron II Doomsday could be considered to be Hearts of Iron II Plus
because it pushes the gameplay of the original beyond 1946 all the way to New
Year’s Day 1954. There’s more here though than a chance to keep your campaign
games going for a bit longer. With the game’s extension into the 1950s, it
throws early Cold War technology and espionage into the mix – the gameplay takes
a decidedly different tack when you can start nuking your neighbors. The game
even includes a new scenario that begins with a literal bang with the US nuking
Moscow in an attempt to stop the Russian horde pouring into Europe before you
even take control. There’s nothing here that will change your mind about Hearts
of Iron if you didn’t enjoy the previous games, but if you’re a fan you’ll
certainly enjoy the new content.
If you’re new to Hearts of Iron II, here’s a quickie summary to get you up to
speed. The game takes the concept of grand strategy to its ultimate limit by
using the entire world as its game map. Every country on Earth during the late
1930s is represented in the game, with you commanding the military, economic,
and political leadership of one of them and the computer AI handling the rest of
the nations. The learning curve is steep, to say the least, as you not only need
to monitor your production, military effort, research, and diplomacy, you must
do it on a global scale against the march of a relentless real-time clock.
OK, so back to the new stuff. With the extension into the 1950s, the game
picks up the new technology and weapons of the era. In addition to the
aforementioned nukes, you also get the ICBMs and boomers (nuke subs) to deliver
them. Jets fill the skies while the next generation of armored vehicles clash
below. The new weapons technology adds more variety to the game and makes the
end game more dynamic, which is certainly a good thing when you’ve extended the
end game by seven years. Of course the ultimate new weapon here is the atom bomb
and in fact researching it and its related technologies will dominate the end
game. Hearts of Iron II was certainly a complicated game and this version can
make it more so as you need to focus on the race to split the atom while trying
to manage the whole global conflagration thing.
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