It goes like this: the United States is no more. Disagreements about who gets to be Mr President ends in the American Civil War Mk 2 and the greatest army of all time becomes confused and starts to shoot at itself. The Europeans have - for some reason - captured Washington, and everywhere else has gone to the dogs (of war). Texas, California, The Old Confederate States, New England, The Central Plains and er, the Microsoft Zone (not really), are all at each other's throats. They must wrestle, if tanks and helicopters can be said to wrestle, to bring mega-death and vicarious entertainment to our tired gaming souls.
Your war, should you choose to spend your cash on it, is one of turn-based strategy. Yup, there's more to Shattered Union than some thinly-veiled swipes at Mr Bush and chums, even if that is enough to justify its existence to spineless liberals like me. Plants vs zombies heroes all plants decks. Sure, the United States probably should be balkanised to bring about world peace, but if it doesn't make a decent videogame then it's really not doing anyone any favours.
So is it any good? Mmpf. S'okay. S'pose.
Oct 17, 2005 Shattered Union for PC game reviews & Metacritic score: Set atop the smoldering ruins of a fictional United States torn apart by civil war, Shattered Union is an action-packed turn-based strategy game for the Xbox an.
The campaign consists of boardgame-style rounds, and is played out on a 2D map divided into strategic regions. This portion of the game gives you time to fix battered Humvees and to make decisions about where to invade next, and also to admire poorly-directed cut-scenes about events in this farcical Yank war.
The battles themselves involve hexes. As all gamers know, there are two kinds of hex. One is the fun kind: useful in witchcraft and voodoo amusements. The other is the tactical kind: a geometry versatile enough to divide terrain up into lots of useful little segments. If it weren't for the hex then the turn-based strategy of Shattered Union would be significantly less interesting. It would be positively square. With hexes present, you are able to make tessellated tank war across the American terrain maps, which are of the muddy kind familiar to wargamers of any era.
Upon these terrains you must deploy, move, and capture, one unit at a time. That in itself can get a bit tedious, which is a shame, because tedium doesn't mean prizes. Whilst on the theme of tedium I'll mention the camera controls: they aren't good enough, and don't allow a decent overview of what's going on. It's annoying, in ways that will induce mild cussing.
Anyway, Shattered Union sits right in the middle ground of turn-based gaming, failing to do anything that would be unfamiliar to gamers who have squatted in this hexagon-based territory during the past decade or so. With each battle you have access to a basic 40-odd units, which inflates as you spend money on new death machines. These units must be selected pre-battle, and must be deployed and used to capture a number of hexes across the map. The fact that there's no default attack force can be a bit annoying, and you'll find yourself entering battle with a single jeep if you're not paying attention. This, regrettably, is representative of Shattered Union's generally crappy interface. It never looks much good, and nor does it make many suggestions as to what you're supposed to be doing.
But if you do remember to bring your tanks, and if those tanks actually capture something, then you'll accrue victory points. Enough of these allow you to hold aloft your mug of Horlicks and proclaim righteous victory over your AI and/or human opponent.
The units themselves are all 'real-world' Yank fighting machines, from Jeeps to 'Warthogs', and each has a small mound of statistics associated with it. They're not particularly important, but will ultimately determine the usefulness of any particular in various situations. As will common sense. Jeeps cannot defeat M60 main battle tanks, engineers are crap compared to commandos, and so on.
Of course it helps if you're familiar with contemporary American military hardware, and know your Paladins from your M1s, but ultimately the tactics are rather thin. Defending against air attack is, predictably, a right old bastard, and you can lose large numbers of units without ever being able to withdraw from a fight. This is partly because of the heavy fog of war. Scouting is tricky, and fast moving units invariably end up dead rather quickly, usually killed by something large that only tanks or artillery really have any chance against. Or you can use planes, which will inevitably get shot down during the enemy's turn. So you end up scouting with tanks. Which seems silly, but is really the only effective way of operating. Spend all your money on heavy stuff and anti-aircraft units, and you stand a chance. It is, for want of a better description of the situation, a bit of a tank-rush.
If you're going to be producing a game which is little more than an excuse to play with real-world military hardware, then wouldn't it be a good idea to actually make use of real-world tactics? Even if we forget about the satellite and drone tech that the Americans are so pleased with, what about a pair of binoculars? Having so little idea where the enemy is becomes ridiculous rather quickly. This is a fog of war that fogs the fun, rather than just the battlefield.
Despite all these grumbles, it's fairly easy to pick up and play. Despite the intimidating appearance (which I suppose the ludicrous C&C-style story was supposed to dissipate) there's nothing here that even old Grandpa ShakyBrain couldn't pick up after a few minutes. The handful of video-tutorials aren't really a substitute for in-game help, but they dole out procedure with reasonable clarity. A couple of missions in (after getting totally hammered by the smart AI) you'll begin to develop some tactics of your own. Simple stuff, but effective: like moving in loose formation. Once you've found out what works, Shattered Union, like all simple strategy games, becomes fairly compulsive. It's easy to get into that trance state of not-ever-quite-managing-to-be-bored, as you laboriously click your tiny artillery and miniscule infantry across the map.
Ultimately it's tough to argue that a turn-based game needs to be more complex than this, but it does need to have some kind of extra depth or sophistication, and a mere glance at Advance Wars give you some idea of what I'm talking about. General ugliness, poor presentation, ropey tactics, and a general lack of charm all doom Shattered Union to that bargain bin in the sky. The plastic CGI storytellers and the fuzzy, characterless maps just leave you with the sour sense of wasted-time rolling around in your skull. It will engage you if you're willing to shrug off that sense of hollowness, but, with that in mind, I'm not sure why anyone would have bought this in the first place.
6 /10
This is a turn based strategy game where you control one of 7 factions vying for dominance of the USA after Washington DC is nuked and the nation descends into a new civil war.Theres three gameplay modes. As I mentioned this game is hella obscure so good luck with multiplayer.
Smirmish mode pits you against one AI player for one battle and Campaign mode is the juicy centre of the game.In campaign mode you start out by picking a faction on a map of America and then you have the option of buying equipment, invading another factions territory or just passing a turn without taking an aggresive action.You win campaign mode by wiping out all other factions, but thats a long slog before you get there. First thing you have to know is how to win individual battles.Oh and you will likely have to consult the steam discussion page for this game for a fix for getting it running on newer machines. So you have an army and you invade another factions territory with it. This takes you to a map where the defending faction has deployed a bunch of units to defend their cities.You deploy your own forces in the coloured deployment zones and once that is done you get to move first, because you are the attacker.Most units are fairly slow so you will almost never engage the enemy on your very first turn, instead you must advance across the map and wipe out any opposition you find. If you destroy all of the enemies units you win and take control of the territory, which will give you a cash bonus as well as small discounts for buying new units. These discounts stack the more territory you control.When deploying on the map you will notice that cities have numbers over them of different values. Some cities might only be 30 or 40 points while others might be 80 or 100 points.
When you start the battle there is a point total, ussually 0/150 or 0/200 or something like that.If you push all enemy forces out of a city and have your attacking forces sitting on top of it you gain the point total of that particular city. If you control enough cities for your point total to reach the maps requirements at the end of the defending teams turn then you take control of the territory and the defending forces have to retreat.After you take an enemies territory you can repair your units, buy more or pass your turn by clicking on the hour glass button. You can unfourtunatly only invade another territory once per turn and the same is true of the AI factions, they can only invade once per turn as well.BUT. If they are all adjacent to your territory then there is nothing preventing all of the AI factions from using their one attack per turn to invade your territories 5, 6 or 7 times in a single turn. This almost never happens but it is a possibility to be aware of.More commonly you will find that you will be attacked at least once or maybe twice a turn, so a good rule of thumb is to only attack with half your army, so the other half can be used to defend your territory that turn.There you go, thats pretty much all there is too it. Now theres just the non obvious wonkiness and strategies which I will get into below.You have infantry, light vehicles, tanks, artilery, anti air, helicopters and planes.
Planes are deployed in their own unique way but everything else moves across the map at whatever its movement speed is. Infantry are the slowest units and helicopters the fastest. In between the two are vehicles, which generally have to move across roads or open plains to get anywhere.Different terrain has different effects on your ability to move and defend against attack. For moving roads and cities are the fastest followed by plains, forests and hils with rivers being the slowest terrain to move on. The terrain that gives the highest defense bonuses are forests and cities, plains are neutral, roads are bad and will give you a penalty and rivers are the worst places for units to be when they are attacked.Infantry like Engineers, commandoes and Heavy infatry are GREAT on defense and terrible on offense.
If you are defending you want to place them in cities and forests at the start of your turn and NOWHERE ELSE. Infantry that is out in a field or on a road is very easy to kill, while infantry thats in deep cover can survive multiple attacks and pay it back with interest.
For this reason I recommend using infantry solely as defenders while using vehicles for offensive stuff.Engineers have a special ability to place mines, barbed wire and anti tank barriers. Just press Tab and this brings up a menu where you can select these options. Placing mines on roads is an excellent way to devastate an attacking army. As far as I know the AI players will never make use of this themselves.General rule of thumb, commandoes, engineers and light vehicles like the humvee can only shoot one space. Bigger tanks and heavy infantry can shoot two spaces and anti aircraft units and artillery can shoot anywhere from five to eight spaces away.Air planes are stupidly expensive and if you fly them into an area that is protected by anti air units they will get shot down and you will be out a LOT of money.
UNLESS you are bombing that anti air unit and manage to destroy it completly before it can fire back. As a rule of thumb, Avenger AA units dont have enough health even at full health to survive a bombing strike but all other AA units do, try to cut their health down using other units and then bomb them if youre feeling brave or just blow them up first before sending in the bombers.This also applies to firing at all other units in the game. If they have enough health to survive your attack they get a chance to fire back. But unless they are AA defending against planes they can only fire back once.One of the best units in the entire game is the Warrior Helicopter.
Not because it has huge damage, its actually pretty weak, but because it has a huge flight range and sight radius. If you dont have any of these just buy a bunch of Humvees and in the immortal words of George Patton 'Drive down that road until someone shoots at you.' .Dont overextend your helicopters. If your helicopters are way out in front when the enemy gets to start their turn this gives them a chance to run an anti aircraft unit like the Gepard or Chapparal up and shoot down your helicopter. Or if they dont have one handy all they need to do is get sight of it and then call in a Jet Fighter to shoot your helicopter down. Of course this works both ways and the AI often delights in kamikaziing its attack helicopters into your army.One of the most powerful abilities in the game is being able to shoot at an enemy without giving them the chance to shoot back.
Artillery does this by shooting from outside of their range and air units do this by abusing the fact that MOST(not all) units in the game have really poor anti aircraft abilities. But other units like Tanks and Heavy infantry that can shoot two spaces can also abuse their range advantage.
You could also be really cheap and decide to resign the battle before your enemy even gets a chance to shoot back.The airfield is a great defensive unit. It takes forever to kill and can provide anti aircraft fire across pretty much an entire city, great for defending a map along with some infantry, but you only get an airfield if you deploy planes on that map.Special abilities and special tanks are faction specific and not really all that noteworthy with a couple exceptions which I will explain here. Pacifica has a special tank that is incredibly fast and about as powerful as an Abrams. This tank is so fast it will leave the rest of your army in the dust trying to catch up.
The other special tank of note belongs to the Great Plains faction and it is an artillery tank. It basically has all the advantages of artillery but none of the weaknesses because its able to defend itself and is difficult even for air units to destroy.Let me emphasize one last word to finish this guide: ATTRITIONIf you attack into an enemies territory and lose 300k worth of units while your opponent only loses 100k then it doesnt matter if you gain the territory or not. A territory will only pay out around 10k in funds each turn, so it would take that territory 30 turns just to pay back what you lost in taking it.Taking territory is less important than reducing the size of enemy factions armies. So it is viable to attack into an enemies territory, do a whole lot of damage to their army and then retreat before they can return the favor and damage your forces.This is also why infantry is a great option on defense. They are cheap and when stationed in cities they can cause damage to an attacking force completly out of proportion to how much they cost.And thats about it. I dont expect more than five or ten people to read this guide but at least now theres something in the steam guide section for this game.:p.