Been playing a little Burden Of Command. It’s been kind of a remarkable experience and I’m not sure how to describe it without coming across as more negative than I really intend, but I think most people here will get where I’m coming from.
Overall big picture the game system stuff is nifty. It’s a turn based tactics game following Nickel Company 7th Infantry Regiment 3rd Infantry Division (didn’t catch the battalion assignment) during WWII. At the outset you play as a Lieutenant in command of 1st Platoon although there are hints of a battlefield promotion at some point. It’s basically Band Of Brothers the Game structurally and kinda sorta you can see what they were going for aesthetically. The guiding principle of the game is to put you in that command position and to give you limited time/resources/information to make critical decisions. To that end, the game does this cool thing with moves being contingent both on your individual squads’ action points, but also on a limited number of Orders you can give them each turn. So in effect you have a surplus of moves your soldiers can make vs the amount of orders your commander can disseminate. This works quite well in shaping decision making toward coherent planning, caution vs taking initiative, and being periods of being reactive to assertive enemy movements. Imagine if in Fire Emblem you could only move 4 of your 8 units each term, for example. The commander units (the various platoon commanders + company commander who is sort of a jack of all trades) move individually across the battlefield and can temporarily attach to squads, then use different Shin Megami Tensei type buffs in them. Think when Winters goes running around to different platoons and tells them what to do in Band of Brothers. This scarcity of moves/orders also helps give the experience of playing the battles something like real-time pressure while still being turn based. Overall all of this is cool I think. The rest of the battle stuff is pretty familiar to anyone familiar with Advanced Squad Leader - lots of emphasis on fire elements, maneuver elements, suppression, morale, etc etc.
Then in addition to that there’s a visual novel weighty decisions narrative that mostly takes place between battles, but is also woven through them to a lesser extent. The Band of Brothers worship seems a bit limiting in that I imagine the mold will not be broken as far as Greatest Generation stuff goes, but on the other hand that’s meant a high floor in terms of video game writing. It’s mostly inoffensive and pretty decent for basically an amateur designer. The map and unit art looks quite good in a colorful but not overdoing way, reminiscent of Civ II and III and the old Panzer General games.
That amateur designer sensibility though is what is making the game kind of remarkable as I mentioned. It’s been a while seen I’ve seen this much scotch tape on even an indie game. You all will understand that I describe what follows with affection rather than derision. 10 years of enthusiastic amateur development really shows. The tutorial is kind of hilarious in this respect. The game mechanics are a bit novel and deep, but they’re not that complex and certainly not beyond what you’d assume the target audience of Advanced Squad Leader mutants could grasp pretty quickly. But the developer seems to be shooting for the Fire Emblem “normies” as well, so the tutorial is really kind of long, and made longer because it’s broken up with the designer inserting video clips of himself re-explaining and sometimes contradicting the text tutorial (which is acknowledged but still not like corrected lol). He also openly talks about other games to explain things in this game “so this is kind of like Xcom…”. And he even inserts screenshots of these other games to make his points. Never seen that before. The visual presentation has issues with resolution and formatting. The developers lean heavily on public domain historical photos, some of which are just blurry and low res. That and also what appear to be images sourced from social media (but still credited). For example there’s a little moment when your troops are in North Africa and see stray dogs, then there’s an image of dogs standing around a dusty street and it’s credited to some guy, Tunisia, 2008. So it was important that we get a photo of actual Tunisian dogs and I’m guessing just someone gave permission for them to use an old photo of theirs. Then there’s the frequent application of Ted Turner style colorization on many of the vintage photos. You can turn this off in the options menu, but you get a tool tip asking you to leave it on because “lots of volunteers tried really hard on this :)”. The narrative also adds interstitial footage of old vets talking about their experiences again like Band of Brothers. Not sure about the sourcing here or what clips were selected or why, but I noticed that one of these clips had the poor old guy struggling with some memory issues and trying to remember the word “grenade” but having a hard time. Why was this included???
There’s also a little oddness conceptually where you get the impression that things made sense within the designer’s head, but don’t quite translate. There are weird numbers and abbreviations with underscores and stuff that seems like placeholders that snuck into the release. The commanders can have “Mindsets” and there are a lot to choose from. You can put points into 5 Mindsets and 3 can be active at one time. Another oddity is the use of actual war injury and death photos, like the graphic stuff that would never make it into a Time Life coffee table book. The game always gives you a “look away” option so you don’t see it, and I get that the developers were going for a Horror Of War effect, but still idk that’s something of a odd strategy imo.
So overall I’m engaged with it, and I wouldn’t say don’t buy it. In fact I think the designers game up with genuinely cool stuff and I hope they find success. The amateur stuff is more amusing than damaging, though it does take you out of the experience a little because the mood/atmosphere isnt always sustained for very long before you run to a huh? kind of moment. A very strange combination of hardcore WWII company level tactics (intended), weighty visual novel melodrama (intended), and then sort of forensic meta-game interrogation of independent game development (unintended)
