Hearts of Iron 2 Description:

Hearts of Iron 2 review:
1 stars (Gets old too quickly) - I've been playing this game for a week now, and I already got bored of it. There's not really much to do, only this:



Make Operation Barbarossa succed playing Germany.



Take the Suez cannal as Germany.



Build a nuclear bomb and nuke your enemy (As any country)



That's it. You will find that the rest of the game consists of buiding units and fighting. There's no way to deal with your population, no social options, so the game consists 100% of fighting. Not fun when you play the 1936 scenario and have to wait three years for the war to start.



The incompetent AI makes everything worse. I never had to build the Atlantic Wall when I was playing Germany, because the allies never attempt to land in France, or in any other place. The only thing the americans do in the game is wipe the floor with your navy and bomb your units. They don't even bomb your industry. Not fun. The Italians get kicked out of N Africa and that's where it ends, because they never try to invade Italy and force it to surrender. It seems that the AI is not interested in fighting the war.



The same with the Soviets. No matter how much you suck at strategy, you will always win. It's strange but true. I'm a complete newbie at this, but all I did was attack them where they have the smallest number of units and without a challenge I reached Moscow in some months. They don't try to counter attack. I was looking a tough challenge, but increasing the difficulty only makes your units fight worse, even in Very Hard/Furious the Americans will never do a D-Day.



There's no espionage stuff either. Forget about using commandos or that sort of stuff.



The bottom line is, the only fun of this game is making the genocidal maniacs win (How fun!), which is ridicously easy, and, well... Not much else. It's a bit interesting to see some what-if scenarios too, like the Checz fighting, the Republicans winning the Spanish civil war and etc. You have the option to give control of territories to nations like the Wallonians, Croats, Slovaks, Serbians, almost every country in the world, which can be fun (when you are extremely bored).



I was interested at first at playing my country, Argentina, and try to make it intervene in the war. Not possible. Every country except the big ones (Germany, Japan, USA, England, France, etc) doesn't have any industrial capacity. Have fun trying to get your industry off the ground. Maybe this could be solved by allowing the mentioned countries to give industrial assistance to the smaller ones, i.e building their industry, but such thing is not possible.



Rainy day? Bored like hell? Go and buy it. Have 2 hours of fun resisting as Finland against the Soviet Union, making the Ardennes Offensive or Operation Sealion succed. There's not much else you can do with this game. Wait till the price drops a little or you'll feel dissapointed.
4 stars (Lots of play for your buck) - HOI2 is a World War simulator. It's extremely deep and very, very complex. This game will require you to read the rulebook, play a few practice games, and it wouldn't hurt to have a general knowledge of WWII history and strategy. If you're looking for a tough strategy game with a lot of depth and great replayability, this is your game.
5 stars (Hearts Of Iron 2) - Great, Complex game not for the average game player. Very detailed and time consuming to play. I enjoyed HOI the original but the second version is much better because they cleaned up many of the odd none realistic stratagies that could be used.