Hearts of Iron III Review

[marryroy]

Hearts of Iron III is a grand strategy game on a global scale that starts in 1936 and ends in 1947. It also includes a number of pre-set dates so players can jump right into the action after a key moment. Players can choose to lead any nation they want, from Canada to South Afrika to Japan, and will be in charge of selecting domestic policies, research goals, production priorities, diplomatic positions and army and navy orders. And while that's true of many grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron III gets down to such details as hiring and firing specific cabinet ministers, licensing designs for foreign production, building individual brigades, setting invasion times to take advantage of daylight and weather effects, and selecting sites for new rocket test labs.

The game also improves on the scripted history of Hearts of Iron II with the addition of new decisions and laws that come up according to preset conditions. So you may play a game where France holds out in a war against Vichy France, or where the US joins the Allies in 1937, or where Ecuador and Peru find themselves drawn into the alliances and wind up fighting their own war in South America. While the general alliances of the main powers are fixed, the game can go in many interesting directions from there. In one of our games, the Chinese crushed the Japanese invasion and Russia was able to liberate Europe by the end of 1943.

While it sounds like the player would soon get bogged down under such an avalanche of seemingly minor details, the sum total of all those individual details can add up to huge consequences. When facing a supply shortage, for instance, you may reduce consumer goods in order to trade other commodities on the world market in return for rare metals that your factories need. When they help increase production, you can start cranking out supplies for your soldiers, but dissent has risen because you cut consumer goods, so your population isn't producing as much as they were before. Now you need to balance your nation's industrial capacity between the two so your people are happy enough to keep working and your soldiers aren't left unsupplied on the battlefield. And that's not even considering that your factories are also responsible for upgrades and reserves for units in the field and for the production of new combat units, ports, radar stations and such.

It's not just the decisions you're making at a high level either. Hearts of Iron III has several thousand individually modeled territories, of which around 10,000 are on the land. That something like four times as many in the previous game in the series. While it may seem a bit overwhelming at first (and, face it; it is) the number of territories actually works to make the combat more tactical. Rather than having a front that's just a few territories across, you'll now be fighting on fronts that are 10-20 territories across. This means the attacker and defender will have smaller concentrations of units spread out over a wider area, which makes breakthroughs, flanks and envelopments even more sophisticated than before. Added infrastructure limits and supply needs make it impossible for players to create the capital-bound steamroller armies that appear in some other grand strategy games.