Selected casualties from the battle of Stalingrad.

Hans Heitig – Died of starvation when he drove his car into tree and failed to find the reverse gear to extricate himself.

Frans Freitig – Was KIA when he stopped to admire the scenery in a dangerous assault move.

Jans Jeitig – Bravely assaulted a platoon of enemy tanks on his motorcycle.

Vans von Veitig – Got so depressed with the stupidity of his comrades that he committed suicide.

Stalingrad is a dismal disappointment. As time progresses and videogames evolve into more elaborate and highly enjoyable forms of entertainment, you tend to expect great things from new releases. But Stalingrad obnoxiously gives progression the finger and contentedly rots away in sterility.

The prospect was fairly exciting. A recreation of the events leading up to the battle of Stalingrad, and climaxing in the battle itself. The game claims astounding historical accuracy, basing the missions on what exactly happened, including realistically replicated maps for you to follow through the footsteps of our ancestors.

There are two campaigns to play through. The first is from the perspective of the German forces, letting you lead the Wehrmacht into Stalingrad. Then you swap sides and become the Soviet forces when they boot the Nazis out of the city and reclaim it for themselves. The idea of building something up in one campaign, only to systematically tear it down in the second campaign is of debatable satisfaction, but is certainly an interesting notion.

In practise though, that wonderful prospect is methodically ripped up into little shreds and trampled into the mud by some of the shoddiest game mechanics I’ve experienced in quite a while. There is no tutorial to teach you the intricacies of the game, so you are just shoved straight into the first mission with just your default RTS skills to guide you.

Let’s run through that first mission shall we. The one that laid the groundwork for the entire campaign. Your objectives are fairly generic; take a cemetery by force and then move on to the crossroads. Okay, simple enough. I select all my troops and order them to the right place via the mini-map. It is here you notice that you cannot set any kind of formation with your units, you just have to manually arrange your own layout if you want them to travel sensibly.

Having organised my armoured vehicles to lead the way, and my support vehicles bringing up the rear, I set off to the cemetery. However, my motorbike units don’t seem too keen on staying with the rest of the pack, so before I can stop them they have buzzed off out of formation at top speed en route to the objective. I move quickly to select them and bring them back but they have already met a mounted gun emplacement and suffer an instant death.

I continue bringing the rest of my troops up and raze the dratted gun to the ground. Now I order them to the cemetery again. To get there requires a left hand turning across a bridge. My lead tank drives straight past the bridge and gets stuck in the scenery beyond. The next tank actually turns left but meets heavy fire from the other side of the bridge and stops. He refuses to budge either forwards or backwards despite my earnest yells and curses, and dies shortly after, thus blocking the entire bridge, making it impossible for the rest of my men to follow.

There is another lengthy route around which doesn’t require use of the bridge, so I reluctantly head my troops in that direction. For no apparent reason the leading tank suddenly stops, and the second tank runs right into him, and the rest pile up too. When I try to get them going again I find that the two leading tanks have become inexplicable attached, and it takes several minutes of coaxing and wheedling to separate the idiots again. Shortly after, my entire platoon is wiped out by some unknown force that isn’t within my visibility.

That is a small sample of what the game plays like. I was hoping things would get better later on, but they never do. The pathfinding is possibly the most annoying aspect of the game, as it takes a Herculean effort to do something as stupidly simple as moving from one place to another. They will always run into obstacles, each other, or sometimes just spin around on the spot for ages.

Other inadequacies include the fact that some troops will remain unharmed after a tank runs directly over them. Then you have tissue paper armour on all of your tanks, so they tend to blow up at any opportunity. I have even seen the turret on a tank continue turning when the tank has been blown up. The isometric perspective also allows a depressingly narrow and unalterable field of view from which to conduct your military manoeuvres.

The appalling unit balance then robs the last scrap of sense or enjoyment from the game. I took a platoon of tanks down a busy road, and was attacked from the side by another tank division. They killed all my tanks within seconds bar one. That one remaining tank then attacked the entire enemy division and annihilated them all without taking so much as a scratch. Another example: I run some of my infantry past a mounted gun and some entrenched soldiers. Not one dies. Then I get spotted by one armoured vehicle, and it takes down all my men within seconds. The unit balancing is worse than a blind tightrope walker with two wooden legs.

In other matters, there is a lovely little help window that pops up every time you first visit a menu screen. It includes handy details, like the fact that to scroll the text you need to drag the scrollbar to the left of the text downwards. Except the scrollbar is on the right of the text. Fantastic!

Even the game’s claim to historical accuracy has to be taken with a pinch (or indeed a barrel) of salt, because no matter how accurate the locations are, it is patently obvious that real soldiers of WWII were not the feather-brained, pathetic wretches that this game has on display. Our forebears did have a degree of intelligence, and this just does not carry across when you see your digital soldiers getting tangled over their own tank tracks or getting stuck in the scenery.

If this were a sparse genre, then Stalingrad could be possibly be forgiven a little. But when you have multitudes of other WWII heavyweights such as Blitzkrieg patrolling the horizons, then this game serves only to emphasise its own clumsy inadequacy. There is realistically no reason why anyone should buy this game. Ever!

Adam Shirley