Fortress Europe: The Liberation of France Review

WWII is still an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the computer game developers. Most of the computer games dealing with this war tend to focus on the D-day, i.e. the day the allied forces landed in Normandy. This turning point of the war served as a basis for the game which appeared on the European market last year as Normandy, and which has been revised for the US market as Fortress Europe: The Liberation of France.

Matrix Games, well known for its (recently intensified) hyper-production of low-budget strategy games, and their developer Lamb Soft decided to define Fortress Europe: The Liberation of France as a turn-based war game, with a real-time strategy gameplay, meant for beginners. This sounds good, even a bit pretentious, but what we finally got is below any decent criteria. What's more, if you give this game to a beginner, he'll probably never want to play another strategy game in his life.

Looks like thousands of bugs are taking over the world...

Hm, a nice enough place. Could use a golf course though.

In the main menu, you can choose which side you want to play. There is a special campaign that lets you reenact the D-day, by assuming control of the troops on any side one day before the operation began. In order to increase the game's replay value, the developer added four more campaigns which are not strictly based on historical events, and which can be tweaked up to your preference. You can also select the starting date of any of the campaigns.

Now, though it is formally a strategy game, Fortress Europe is focused mostly on the operative segment of warfare. Chronologically, it covers the period from one day before the invasion on Normandy, all to the potential liberation of France. The action takes place in real-time, with one in-game day lasting about half an hour of actual time, but you can always pause the game in order to issue orders to your troops. All units have been represented with generic sprites which show whether they are infantry, armored or artillery units.

Commanding units functions much the same as in any RTS. You will also be able to summon air support, set mines and order paratroopers to land in a certain area, but the only problem about this is that you can only determine the possible outcome of your actions by trial and error; the obscure manual you get with the game is utterly useless.

You will spend most of the time on the main screen where the action takes place. There are two more important screens in the game - one is used for acquiring new troops and equipment and the other contains a strategic map where you can issue orders for your entire army (significant only in massive operations).

When you play the historical campaign, you will face the horrific perils the allied troops encountered while landing on the Omaha beach. You will have to bring your vessels right next to the coast and command your men to conquer it. This is a real nightmare, which is not only caused by the well fortified German machine guns, but also by the fact that your marines act like complete morons thanks to their AI, which obviously doesn't include any path-finding routines. If you wish to prevent utter destruction of your units you will have to keep incessantly clicking each and every one of your units and then pointing it where you want it to go. This creates a weird form of micro-management where it is less than desired or necessary. And even when you get to stand on dry grounds, the idiotic path-finding code will completely thwart the well-devised concept which should have enabled you to control your units on different levels of hierarchy. Your units will frequently tend to group very close together and stop with no apparent reason at all, which makes them ideal for cannon fodder! The supply trucks function so poorly, you will frequently abandon a unit in need of supply because that will cost you less nerves and time than trying to make a supply truck reach it. And this is far from the end of it. if you play the game long enough, the dates will start getting negative values?!

The graphics are the least disastrous element of the game. A screen depicting the situation on the field can even look good, if the angle's just right, but the bugs in the graphic engine took care that even this part of the game turns out to be... strange. For instance, sunken ships will tend to visually resurrect themselves even though they do not exist as objects in the game anymore. The greatest enigma about this segment of the game are the hardware resources it requires and the speed with which the graphics are being drawn, if we take into consideration that the graphics look like what we had a chance to see in the early days of Amiga (or even late days of Commodore 64). The backgrounds are monotonous, the units are generic and poorly drawn, and structures look like drawings from Russian cartoons from the fifties (ugh, I wonder what those were like - ed).

And for the last blow: the interface! In fact, Interface is probably not the best way to describe the couple of buttons that can be used for issuing orders to your units and the ugly cursor you are using to click them. The only information that you will be able to get about each unit is its "health bar" and nothing more!

Fortress Europe: The Liberation of France is an utter disaster! I haven't seen a worse game in quite some time, and the only reason we noticed it was the fact that the publisher is trying to sell this for a couple of dozen dollars. It would be fairer if they paid you for defiling your hard drive with this piece of crap if you make the mistake of purchasing it.