Sudden Strike 4 Impressions – Strategic Warfare

I’m not the most strategic player when it comes to video games as I enjoy to go full force at my enemy from the start. However, with Sudden Strike 4 I found that strategic gameplay certainly has its advantages and to top it off, gameplay was incredibly entertaining.

Sudden Strike 4, from developers Kite Games, is a strategic war game set within World War II where players will take on campaigns that featured Allied, German, and Soviet troops. Each campaign is relatively lengthy giving gamers a wide variety of units to control along with commanders that will offer different playstyles within missions.

A nice aspect that I personally enjoyed with Sudden Strike 4 is that the game is nowhere near slow. Players won’t be sitting there with a focus on resources and building up their units before an attack, but rather, the game gives you your resources from the start with additional support troops throughout a mission, though this may not always be the case.

Before each mission, the game details the entire list of tasks out and it’s within this section that players will have the option to make adjustments to their attributes or skills. These will range from different abilities such as extra defenses or additional weaponry for troops, though to get these skills in the first place, players will have to spend stars.

Stars are earned after each mission and how many is determined by how well you complete a mission. Because of the star bonuses received at the end of a mission, there could be a greater influence on carefully plotting out your next move during the battle, though you can still get away going full assault from the start. I found that going strong at the start wasn’t always the best plan of attack where as I found a greater benefit on carefully ordering air support or flanking the enemy.

There’s plenty of detail that went into the game as well which made the combat feel more realistic. Troops dive to the ground and crawl towards more cover during the heat of battle, thick terrain offered more camouflage, not to mention the need to race a repair truck to a busted tank or sending out for air support when you become pinned.

Visually I don’t have any complaints about the video game, in fact, there was far more detail than I expected. Explosions shot up bodies into the air while trees, towers, and hedges were demolished by tanks. Watching the battles play out was well worth the strategic planning that went into completing a task.

The same could be said when it comes to the audio for Sudden Strike 4. Generally, I play close attention to the audio during gameplay. Thankfully, there was no lack of a voiceover in the title and while there wasn’t a mass amount of dialogue options for the troops, hearing a commander yell for his men to gather, a fallen soldier cry out for a medic, along with alerting the player of an enemy force being spotted really kept the battle feel alive.

All-in-all, the preview build received for Sudden Strike 4 shows a ton of potential that I’m looking forward to seeing fully launch later this August. Likewise, with mod support, I can see the online community being active for quite some time.