Classic Computer Game Review: 'Axis & Allies - PC Edition by MicroProse'

One of the best map board-based war games of all time, Milton Bradley's Axis & Allies is an interesting and very exciting World War II strategy game. In college days of yore, a friend of mine and I bought our first game, with its hundreds of game pieces, dice, rulebook and colorful world map depicting a (very stylized) view of the war situation in the spring of 1942.

The original edition of Axis & Allies is -- if you can still find a copy, that is -- a beautiful board game to see and play, but its main drawback is that it's time consuming to set up. You can't place your forces at random; each of the five major powers (USSR, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S.) has a card telling players where they must place their initial forces on color coded regions all over the world. This process alone can take up at least 15 minutes, perhaps more.

Another problem was the duration of game play. Depending on one's grasp of the basic rules and analytical skills -- and my analytical skills were, back then, pretty rudimentary -- a single turn could take up more than 15 minutes, since each turn is divided into various steps (Weapons Development, Unit Purchase, Combat Moves, Non-Combat Moves, and Fund Collection).

Depending on your strategy and tactical realities at any given point, you can skip most of these if you have no viable options -- just don't forget to collect your funds, but in most cases the player who neglects a step can find him- or herself in deep trouble. That's one reason turns take so long. (The other is, of course, that you must physically move the pieces, consult the game card and/or the rule book and roll the dice. As a result, if your circle of friends doesn't include a very patient war game enthusiast, your board game version of Axis & Allies will end up sitting in a closet gathering dust.

Fortunately, Axis & Allies was popular enough that the now-vanished MicroProse Software (original publishers of Sid Meier's Civilization series, as well as Silent Service II and the F-15 Strike Eagle series) adapted it to the more versatile and easier to manage CD-ROM format in the late 1990s.

While the board game's highly stylized (and simplified) map and its bright color-coded spaces remain the same in the computer version, memory constrains forced the MicroProse/Hasbro Interactive/Infogrames programmers to make some compromises. 

For instance, infantry units in the board game were made to resemble soldiers of their nation-state; British soldiers wore their distinctive WWI-style helmets, while German soldiers wore their coal scuttle "Fritz" head gear. In the 1998 PC game the soldiers are generic but color-coded. However, to make up for this, players' planes change their appearance when Weapons Development attempts result in long-range or jet-powered aircraft.

Otherwise, the basics of the game remain the same. Players can still build up their forces and launch multiple campaigns. Combat is still resolved by rolls of the dice, and the results are still determined by each unit's attack/defense points. (Example, an Infantry unit attacks at a paltry roll of one, but defends at two, reflecting the advantages of being dug in and fortified.)

The beauty of the PC version is that you can play it solo against the PC or in multi-player mode over the Internet or even as a "hot seat" game. Setup is no longer a tedious chore; just place the disc in the drive and you are good to go. You can save the game at any point during a turn, something not easy to do in the board game (unless, of course, you have a dedicated game room and took notes on what transpired during the last turn!)

Axis & Allies' artificial intelligence player(s) can be adjusted from Easy to Difficult by choosing a general and rank (Eisenhower and four stars being the best for the Americans, just to give you an example), so this version is good for novice players as well as veterans of the original board game.

 Furthermore, the cinematics used in "cutscenes" -- showing, say, a submarine making an attack or a squadron of bombers carrying out a raid -- are, even for a 1998 vintage game, impressive.

Because Axis & Allies is an old game by PC game standards, even though I ordered it on Amazon I had to buy it used from a Marketplace seller, so I did not get a handy manual that explains the rules (although the board game rules can be a helpful substitute, the PC version's rules have resolved some nagging issues that plagued board game players) or the various FAQ's about mouse controls and the like. Not that it's hard to figure out...I am no tech wizard and I have figured most of those issues on my own. Infogrames (which owns what once was MicroProse/Hasbro Interactive) also has a download section on its website that has patches to fix a few bugs that affect both the game's appearance and playability.