Old Gamers Never Die: 'Armored Brigade' is a 'Cold War-Turns-Hot' Sim of Ground Combat

A screenshot from my Steam account's Screenshots page. 

 

Hi, there, Dear Reader.

If you are a regular reader of this blog or its WordPress counterpart, A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that I lived through the last 28 years of the Cold War and the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I won’t exaggerate and claim that I went to bed wondering if the next day I’d wake up to the news that the United States was at war with the Soviets. The late Cold War period definitely had its dark, scary moments, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 and the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shootdown of September 1983, but my Cold War experience paled in comparison to folks who were kids in the late 1940s and early 1950s and lived through the creation of the Iron Curtain, the establishment of NATO, the Korean War, the various crises centered on Berlin, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, just to name a few red-letter events of the early Cold War.  

Nevertheless, even though my Cold War wasn’t as frightening as it had been for the generation that preceded mine, I sometimes worried about World War III and hoped that it would never break out.

Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm by Matrix Games

At the same time, sometime in the late 1970s, I became interested in the military balance between East and West and in what-if scenarios that explored possible situations in which the two superpowers found themselves in a crisis and– either by design or accident – find themselves in a Hot War rather than a Cold one.

A screenshot from Killerfish Games' Cold Waters. This is the Soviet antisubmarine helicopter cruiser Moskva at sea. 

Because of this, when I buy the occasional military-themed computer game on Steam, it’s either related to some aspect of the very real Second World War or the very hypothetical Third. And right now, I have at least four Cold War-turns-hot games in my list of games, including Cold Waters, Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, F-117A Nighthawk: Stealth Fighter 2.0. and Armored Brigade.

The newest of the games – in terms of my acquiring them – is Veitikka Studios/Matrix Games’ Armored Brigade, a tactical-level real-time strategy game that allows players to explore a wide range of World War III scenarios involving land warfare at different points in the Cold War timeline.

To its credit, Armored Brigade does not focus solely on U.S.-Soviet clashes in Central Europe; some battles do feature encounters between American and Russian  forces, but the game – which was designed by a mostly Finnish studio and includes at least one Russian member in its staff of designers and programmers – also includes battles between East and West Germans, Finns vs. Soviets, West German vs. Poles, British forces versus Soviet ones, and so on. There’s even a campaign that extrapolates a full-on war between Czechoslovakia and Russia as a result of the real-life Operation Danube of August 1968, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention to crush the socialist reforms of the so-called “Prague Spring.”

Another screenshot from my Steam account. 

Now, now. Don’t fret. I’m not going to write a full-on review of this game, at least not now. I just want to tell you that right now Armored Brigade is my second-favorite Cold War-turns-hot PC game, right after Cold Waters.

For me, Armored Brigade reminds me of one of the first MicroProse games I ever played: NATO Commander. Though that game was more of an operational-level strategy game where you commanded divisions and brigade-size units rather than the regimental level of Armored Brigade, the setting was the same: a clash of arms in Europe between the Western Alliance and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.  The scale of the battle maps and the scenarios differed. NATO Commander was more grand strategy than it was pure tactics, so you never saw individual vehicles or small groups of troops in the game. Armored Brigade is more in the regimental/brigade size unit level, so the battles take place in a smaller scale where you can, at maximum zoom, observe individual tanks or armored personnel carriers (APCs) doing their thing.

Armored Brigade is fun to play. I have already tried out some of the different missions, and even though it is more complicated to play than NATO Commander, it does not require that you take an ROTC course in Military Science to learn how to command your units, set up ambushes, call in artillery or air strikes, or launch an attack on an enemy position.

I’ll probably get around to reviewing Armored Brigade at a later date. For now, I will just say that I recommend it to anyone who likes hypothetical battles and land combat sims such as Combat Missions or Close Combat.

So, Dear Reader, until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you later!