Classified: France '44 Review (Jadedpleb)
game is by no means awful but there are a lot of design choices that make me think none of the dev's have played it beyond the tutorial. Roughly 1/3 of the missions are called "ambush missions" where you get a limited number of stealth takedowns, then when you get those kills, your guys do an ambush and immediately begin a new turn. The free turn is strong for the group of enemies directly in front of you, but you will alert the entire map of enemies, and they all converge on you. One mission i did like that, it was designed in a way that the mission is over very quickly after you ambush, that was fun enough. The second i did, it was an escort mission with a ton of objectives all over the map. just killed immersion for me that there was zero option to play the entire mission stealthy. We were there to sabotage artillery, why would we announce ourselves? especially coming from two missions that let me complete them entirely in stealth. Then the rest of the mission was just constantly getting flanked by groups that were off screen the turn before, this just compounds the next design disaster.
The morale system is just jarringly stupid to me. Never been shot at it to be fair. But I don't think ww2 soldiers were having existential crisis every time they were shot at. I don't think the war would have ended if they did. I understand the Concept of suspended disbelief, but what the fuck are simulating here? positioning needs ot mean something, and when you or the AI get rewarded for taking shots that are terribly positioned or inefficient its deflating. at least it applies the enemy too i guess. every time a character is shot at, they lose morale and not a little bit. most characters are essentially skipping turns after being shot at twice, and are significantly less useful after 1 attack in a turn. not hit, shot at. regardless of cover. So in a game where you are a guerrilla resistance group, your just about always out numbered. So your constantly dealing with characters not moving, then they get flanked and downed. then you have to try and pick them up with another person. They lose all morale and stay still and go down. The morale system causes situations to spiral out of control and made me as player feel like nothing i did mattered. The enemy can just take hopeless potshots at you and close the distance while you cant shoot back because a full health soldier is crying about the wall hes behind being shot. Then they shove their gun in your scared mouth and kill you. I finished that 2nd ambush mission, saw my play time was beyond the refund threshold and sighed. Just seeing how these mechanics were playing off each other was the nail in the coffin for me.
Up until that mission there were other things i liked. The cone of fire on nearly every gun was interesting. I didnt hate the action economy once i got my head around it and started memorising how my units guns worked.
I'm not going to criticise the game being graphically rough, its a strategy game. I thought the setting and tone were good. I will criticise how alike everyone looks. all the enemy units are ANNOYING to differentiate from each other because any detail that would be helpful is beyond lost at the zoom distance you'll play at. The same issue with your own characters. maybe if played deeper into the game and got the best armor that would get better, but i wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. lots of soft locking when your characters run out of actions. at least once a mission you'll have to trick the UI into coming back. The UI is annoying when it is back, equipment and skill screens are tedious to navigate. Having to confirm every attack i make with the spacebar just fucking annoyed me, didnt ever really get used to it.
I think they got too worried about making it different from xcom. The danger with that, is that xcom was the best one of the genre, still is all these years later IMO. People have been looking for more xcom. I think they might have been onto something with the morale system, but they didn't work out the idea enough and if this is what they got it to, they should have dropped it entirely. The ambush mission thing annoys me because the game promotes stealth, then arbitrarily sets limits on your stealth. I don't normally enjoy the stealth component in these games, but i was having a lot of fun with being stealthy with this one. I would have got over the ambush mission thing. But when it compounds with all the problems of the morale issue, I just cant reccomend this game to anyone. and seeing that the game is coming up a year old, i doubt they plan on making any major changes.