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Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory Review: Is It Worth The Price?

Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory Review: Is It Worth The Price?

A real time tactics computer game – Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory takes the cake for creativity and realism. There have been a handful of solid WWII real-time strategy titles released for the PC in recent years, but none capture the action of the conflict on quite as grand a scale as the Sudden Strike series. Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory was released in 2008 for Windows and published by CDV Software Entertainment.

With an emphasis on war strategy and combat over resource management, the series aims to let players enjoy the fight without feeling bogged down by the gritty details. Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory continues to carry the torch onward to victory with an impressive new look and other improvements.

Tactical Aspects of Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory

Sudden Strike
Birds eye view of military base featuring a mini map of plot.

The game completely does away with the resource gathering and management tenets typical to the genre. This lets you focus your attention on the ever-important task of commanding massive armies over land, sea, and air.

Capturing and holding certain positions will sometimes keep reinforcements flowing in steadily. However, often you’ll have to find resourceful ways to keep your armies alive. This can be particularly tough when your troops are low on ammo, torn to shreds, and patching up vehicles on the go, but that’s part of the fun.

Selected units can be assigned aggressive, cautious, and defensive behaviors on the fly which will dictate how they’ll react when they meet enemies while advancing forward. Since it’s damn near impossible to tell one infantry type from the next from the birds-eye-view, hovering the mouse over a unit will make an identifying symbol appear.

When you’ve got five or six full battalions organized and ready to deploy, keeping track of all those units in the heat of battle is no easy burden, and illusions of grandeur will quickly deflate after a few attempts at blindly throwing troops into a well-fortified enemy position.

Features of Sudden Strike 3: Arms For Victory

Sudden Strike
View from above in enemy territory.

The conflict in Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory spans across five large campaigns that cover the war from varied fronts and in different theaters. You can play as the allied forces in their European campaign assault or as the Germans in their push to repel the Allies. The Soviet campaign pits you against the Germans while moving into the Crimean Peninsula. 

Additionally, separate campaigns allow you to play the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of both the American and Japanese armies. Each mission unfolds on immense battlefields that are noticeably larger than what most RTS fans are likely used to. The scale of map sizes can reach up to about five miles wide by five miles in length.

One thing that can certainly be said about the Sudden Strike series is it raises the bar substantially when it comes to the sheer scale of each mission. Massive is a term that only begins to describe the scope of the battles you’ll encounter here. Where many RTS games cap out at a few hundred units, Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory lets you control literally thousands of troops at a time. 

Parting Remarks

The utter size of the forces at your disposal can make diving into the game mildly intimidating for new players. For example, the first mission of the first campaign dumps your relatively huge starting forces along the vast shoreline of Normandy on D-Day, and you immediately come under fire from enemy mortars, artillery, and infantry. It’s a mess that will leave you frantically trying to group forces into manageable chunks so you can organize an attack as you work your way up the beach and beyond. Fortunately, after the initial chaotic confusion fades, the updated control interface makes it easier to manage your armies. However, steep the learning curve, this game is worth checking out and at the end of the day it’s worth investing in.

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