History: Legends of War: Patton

Hover mouse over screenshots for commentary.

February 2016

This was a free game via PS Plus and I admit I thought to myself "History: Legends of War: Patton? Wow, they're really scraping the bottom of the barrell for PS Plus these days." However, my compulsion to be thrifty and play every game I've technically paid for caused me to give it a chance. Much to my surprise it's actually a pretty good game! The History Channel has done it!

Functionally the game plays very similarly to Xcom, a very good and critically acclaimed video game series that was recently rebooted. It's your army vs. the enemy, and fighting is done through turn based movement and attacks. You train up soldiers and they improve their stats with each success, but if they die they're dead for good. Perma-death: the trademark of any intriguing game. Since death is permanent there's a lot of pressure to keep your soldiers out of harm's way, but there's also pressure to be aggressive so the enemy doesn't recklessly take out your army.

There are a variety of troop classes including snipers, rocket launchers, rangers, commandos, tanks, and planes. The strong troops are very expensive; if you spend all of your money on good troops and get them killed then you may not be able to progress any further in the game. In addition to upgrading your troops via experience and spending your money to train new ones, you gain points after each mission to upgrade your army as a whole. For example, you can upgrade the health of all of your units or even give them more shots per turn.

There was a story to the game which I'm sure had some bearing in actual history, but I didn't play close attention - I'm guessing the Allied forces still won WWII. (Sorry, History Channel. You tried.)

Some game mechanics were a bit unbalanced at times, and there were intense difficulty spikes in some of the later levels. However, I found the gameplay to be almost always engaging and thought the game overall was well made. You're right to be cautious about a game with two colons in the title, but that's the worst part of the game.

	Even though that enemy is outside of my range, I still might hit him if I line up my shot and avoid obstacles.
If you could still take shots at the end of a turn then you automatically use an "overwatch" ability to attack any enemies that enter your sight on their turn.
The enemy uses overwatch as well. Slow and steady is a good strategy. Unlike in the rebooted XCom, you can take multiple steps per turn, so there is no penalty to slowly creep forward.		Ooh, right through the bunker!
Boom!	I blew up them silos.	This tank is expensive but absurdly strong. I could probably beat most of the levels with just this one tank. It's too bad I bought it towards the end of the game.