Old Gamers Never Die: MicroProse and Bird's Eye Games Unleash a New Real-Time Strategy Game Set in World War III - 'Regiments'
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| The wreckage of a Soviet tank platoon burns on a West German battlefield after an airstrike carried out by two A-10A Thunderbolt II ground-attack jets. © 2022 Bird's Eye Games/MicroProse |
On Tuesday, August 16, the revived software publishing company MicroProse released Regiments, a new real-time tactics wargame set in a version of 1989 when perestroika, glasnost, and the collapse of the Soviet Union never happened, and the Warsaw Pact invades West Germany.
Developed by indie game studio Bird's Eye Games, Regiments is a look at combined-arms warfare at the brigade/regimental level that allows players to command units from either the Russian-led Warsaw Pact (WP) forces or the Western alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a searing, life-or-death struggle to determine which side will win this Cold War-Turns-Hot after internal pressures within East Germany push Communist hardliners in Moscow to use force to preserve the Communist regime in East Berlin - and settle accounts with the capitalist West once and for all.
Because I am a fan of the original MicroProse's classic games M1 Tank Platoon, Red Storm Rising, and F-117A Nighthawk: Stealth Fighter 2.0, as well as fictional scenarios featuring a Third World War, I decided to buy Regiments as long ago as last year, which is when I heard about it on a YouTube video by The Historical Gamer.
I purchased Regiments on Day One - August 16 - of its release on Steam, and although I wish Bird's Eye Games had provided a more traditional PDF manual or even a DVD ROM/Printed Manual package, I am enjoying the game. So far, according to the stats on my Steam account, I've played Regiments for 7.3 hours so far this week.
In some ways, this one-player RTT wargame resembles Eugen Systems/Focus Home Interactive's Wargame series, especially Wargame: AirLand Battle and Wargame: European Escalation. Some of the visual tropes (such as Objective Zones marked as names derived from the NATO phonetic alphabet, immersive 3-D graphics, and a zoomable camera) in those games are seen in Regiments, too, but there are also unique features, including era-accurate Tables of Organization & Equipment for historically deployed units on both sides of the Iron Curtain, a proper mix of late 1970s/early 1980s weapons for U.S. Army heavy divisions that were just fielding the newer M1A1 Abrams tanks while still having older main battle tanks like the M60A3 Patton and the original 105mm-gunned M1 Abrams introduced in 1982.
Here's how MicroProse and Bird's Eye Games describe Regiments on the Steam Store's product page for the new game:
Regiments is a Real-Time Tactics game set
in Germany 1989. The Cold War has gone hot, and the inferno is raging. Lead
your Regiment through the fires of conflict and the fog of war. Break through
the lines, call in artillery, maneuver, feign retreats, stage defenses,
counter-attack. Do not relent. – Bird’s Eye Games promo blurb.
I wrote a "first-look" piece on Regiments for my WordPress blog yesterday, so if you want a few more insights into my early experiences with the game, you can so here: War is Hell, as My First Battle in 'Regiments' Pointedly Reminds Me.
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| ⓒ 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse |
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| ⓒ 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse |
I played Regiments for 30 minutes today, and even though I suffered heavier casualties than I would have preferred, my U.S. Army task force defeated a Warsaw Pact opposing force composed by two Soviet/East German units defending an airfield.
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| ⓒ 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse |
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| Here, dug-in Soviet tanks fire at one of my M2 Bradley platoons during the battle. ⓒ 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse |
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| Today's After Action Report, which shows that I still have a long way to go before I am as good a combat leader as Patton or Abrams. ⓒ 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse |
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