With the summers biggest movie, Saving Private Ryan, spawning a renewed interest in WWII history, Empire Interactive has brought us their take on the greatest invasion in the history of armed conflict: the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

When I first looked at this game at E3 I was very impressed with the depth of gameplay Empire was planning on bringing us. This time we see things not faced, but rather taken for granted in most other games, such as lost soldiers, feeding your troops, resting them etc. These things alone set this game apart, but gameplay is not for the faint of heart for there are some issues that do need to be addressed in this one.

This is a true turn based grognards game as every single thing is left to you to decide upon, from who to bring, what to bring, when to sleep, when to eat, to gathering food to eat etc. Pretty involved, and indeed needs a good deal of patience when playing, but it's a challenging game if this is your style of play. I enjoy this game because it has you doing more than the usual strategy title.

While not the prettiest in the graphics department, the graphics do serve their purpose well enough. There is no pristine scenery as in Eidos’ Commandos but this is also not an action RTS title like Commandos. This is a pure turn based strategy game and less time has been spent on the graphics and more time spent on building not just a game as much as a WWII experience.

You’ll start to feel as if you are truly part of this Airborne unit. You'll feel the desperation of being lost, the grief of losing one of your men and the fear of being shot at by unseen enemies as you trek across the unfriendly French countryside.

I must admit, though, that getting from point A to point B can somtimes be long and boring trek. So much so that I’ve wished this was a real-time instead of turn based game at times for some faster gameplay. However, with that approach you just can’t get as deep into statistics, and indeed a turn-based style serves this game better. But the movement speed in the initial release was very slow and degraded the enjoyment of the game. Thankfully a patch has just arrived and I'm now testing the improvement.

Now let’s start from the top and see what this one offers us. The initial start screen is a backdrop of your base in England from which you can access all areas you’ll need prior to embarking on your journey into France. The HQ building is where you’ll receive your mission briefs, the enlisted and officer barracks are from where you’ll choose your 18 man ‘stick’. You’ll pick up supplies from the Quartermaster, head over to the armory to load up on ammo and draw weapons.

You’ll then trudge all this gear over to the airfield and choose your equipment loadouts and seating arrangements. The last step is going up into the wild blue yonder to fly the unfriendly skies of war-torn France.

You also have the option of hitting the training grounds from this main screen, and there you can learn the basics of the game interface as well as play through some other missions that are not available in regular gameplay. You also can access all the weapons values shown in 22 different ratings in the manual including range, encumbrance, penetration, reliability etc.

Once airborne you’ll be treated to a nice little video of your troop carrier flying through varying degrees of flak and each trooper disembarking from the plane. As each trooper leaves you’ll quickly be told whether he lands safely, is lost from group, separated from group, landed but was injured, landed in trees, taking fire, returning fire as well as being hit by enemy fire. You will also receive notice of the unfortunate soul who’s parachute just wasn’t packed quite right and is now a permanent fixture in French soil.

Along with that you get reports of whether your equipment bags make it safely to your drop zone. If they don’t you’ve got a lot of pilfering and scavenging to do, as these bags will carry the extra ammo, food, and other supplies you’ll need to keep your troops alive and happy. It’s not unusual to drop your men in and find one or more men has no ammo, something that can seriously change your tactical thinking on the ground.

Now that you’re on the ground the first order of business, barring any intrusion by those pesky Germans, will be to remove your chute. This can be done at the cost of movement points or Action Points as they are known in this game. You can literally cut the points almost in half needed to remove the chute if your troops are carrying a switchblade. But before removing a chute make sure your men aren’t under fire or spotted. It’s far more important to return fire and live to remove the chute than to attempt to remove it and die trying.

After removing your chute the decisions start to mount up. As leader you must choose where on earth, at least in France, you are. By opening your tactical combat map at the bottom right of your screen you can eye the area and deduce where you are in relation to your proposed objective point by matching up the playscreen you are in with the overall map.

Sometimes you will land right on target and will know where you are and which way you need to head. Other times you’ll have to patrol until you come across something that looks familiar to get your bearings. It’s not a very hard thing to do to find your bearings, but if you don’t pay attention you could easily find yourself heading away from your objective instead of towards it.

While the prospect of roaming a hostile environment to get to your objective may not seem much fun, you should note this is what it was like for the men of the 101st “Screaming Eagles”. They were dropped at night pretty much blindly and were forced to trudge their way to the objective blindly as well. This may not appeal to every gamer out there but if you’re into a more realistic recreation of what this operation entailed through the eyes of a paratrooper, this one does it rather well.

The command interface is accessed through a simple right click and gives you all your movement modes and stances. It also gives options like moving your men off the map singly or as a group, administering first aid, readying weapons, clearing jams etc.

Movement is where I felt things could have been made a bit easier for the gamer, as it can become a bit tedious to move each man individually off the map. The group move that comes in this game doesn’t seem to work as well as it should and can frustrate you while trying to get it to work.

I must point out there is a neat little thing you can use here to make your job a bit more manageable called Auto-Walk. Using this you can pick a spot on the map you want your man to walk to and once he finishes his move hit F9 instead of end turn. This will continue his walk until he reaches the spot you’ve designated, simplifying the micromanagement of movement. This will be interrupted if he spots an enemy, is fired upon or sees an equipment bag lying on the ground.

You’ll also need to note each individual soldiers differences through his stats screen when you’ve clicked on him. Not all soldiers are equal and each has not only different characteristics but unique attributes and encumbrance abilities as well. Health, hunger and morale are all noted here and you need to watch them as they all effect the individual soldiers morale.

Morale is checked through many different thing such as line of sight of friendly troops, presence of enemy troops, the death of squad members while in a soldier's line of sight, etc. Morale is based upon these factors as well as an individuals leadership rating, so each soldier is definitely unique.

When you decide to step off on foot to move out, your movement radius is shown through colored dots, each depending on the type of movement selected. You can go further by running than you can walking or crawling but depending on the situation you face you’ll need to decide which is more appropriate. Bear in mind that for every action you take there is an Action Point cost and if you suspect enemy to be lurking around the corner you’ll want to keep some action points saved for actions you may need to take if contact with the enemy is made during that turn.

If you are seen by the enemy the colored dots will be replaced by eye icons of varying colors depicting the action points you’ll have left once you reach each point. As with the regular colored dots showing your movement radius, the colors are blue, yellow and red. Blue tells you how far you can move your troop and still have enough AP’s left for an aimed shot. Yellow shows how far he can travel and still let off a snap shot from the hip. Red means he can basically do very little once he reaches his destination.

Once you’ve made contact with the enemy, it’s standard turn based fare. You fire… he fires, etc. You also have the options of close combat and searching an enemy after you’ve taken him down.

Things can get pretty interesting once you’ve gotten yourself in a firefight and you must think each move through, as by choosing one course of action you can leave yourself open to an attack from another position. This is where the game becomes much like a chess match, a deadly one at that!

Line of sight is something you’ll need to learn as you go, since there is no LOS fan shown onscreen to let you fully see your troopers facing. It would have been a great help for something like this in a turn based game so you could better set up overlapping fields of fire for patrolling, ambushing etc.

But overall, the use of LOS is managed well once you get familiar with it. It’s one of those situations where you develop a feel for it after playing a few times, and you learn how buildings and terrain work in LOS.

My biggest complaint by far was the movement speed. While using the auto-walk feature I mentioned previously, moving from one point to another was agonizingly slow. And going through 6, 8 or even all 18 troopers (if they all survive the landing) was a long and boring affair. Animation speeds were like molasses , so slow that at times I set auto-walk on and left the room to come back 5 minutes later - and they were still walking!

There is no need for this slowdown, especially since the graphics are not very high end. Thankfully the patch has arrived and I am currently testing it.

There are some nifty features in 101st that may discourage some players initially. The first combat engagement I was in I became dumbfounded by a lone German soldier who knocked off two of my men without me being able to see him. This was due both to my needing to learn the feel of the LOS in the game, as well as the reality that in war you don’t always see who’s shooting at you!

I think we’ve become accustomed as gamers to always seeing our enemies, leaving out the chaos that combat is fraught with. This is something 10st does well. It adds to both challenge and realism. Once I searched house to house I narrowed his hiding spot to a single building, I gathered my remaining men to seek vengeance. Leading in with pineapples I fragged the place good and followed up with a couple of troopers carrying Garands. I was met inside by the crumpled figure of our German sniper, so I did the proper thing and searched his body for intel and goodies and moved on.

You’ll need to move all of your men and cover sectors of fire as you would on a real life patrol, and here’s where the LOS fan could have been helpful. Always try to keep your movements to the blue dots, allowing your men enough action points to return fire with aimed shots (especially your machine gunners when contact looks imminent.)

Maintaining an allocation for action points available is critical in a danger area, because when you or the enemy moves you will be afforded the chance for opportunity fire. You’ll need at least 2 action points to take opportunity fire on a newly seen enemy. If you don’t have it he can get the drop on you and there may not be a second chance for your trooper.

Initiative is also taken into account in 101st. Based on each soldiers initiative ratings at the beginning of each turn, all moves will be made in the order from highest to lowest. Your troops and the enemy troops initiatives change with each turn in combat, depending on the factors they are faced with on their turn.

Let me explain this by taking an example from the manual. If one of your men hears a German soldier scream from a wound inflicted, your soldiers initiative will go up, while a German soldier who is next to the wounded German takes a drop in his initiative. He’s seen or heard his buddy take a piece of lead in the leg and is starting to worry that the next round may have his name on it. Meanwhile the shooter is more than happy to hear the enemy scream so he gets motivated. Now you get an idea of how this works.

101st Airborne is a good game if you like a long turn based game. A mission can take as little as 45 minutes if you drop right in on the unaccommodating Germans or as long as a few hours if you need to move long distances. This time should be decreased with the patch, but it will still take you some time to move and rest your troops across the maps.

Be aware this is not an eye dazzling game the likes of which we’ve gotten used to lately. Eidos has spoiled us with their kick ass game Commandos in the looks department for WWII games (not to mention Lara Croft ain’t too hard on the ol’ cyber eyes either) and 101 has none of those dazzling landscapes or soldiers.

Instead Empire has opted to bring us a game with some very good depth and enjoyment against a stark and dreary landscape, something I feel fits with the theme of the game pretty well. If you watched Saving Private Ryan and felt compelled to know what it was like to be in the D-Day invasion, check this title out it just might suit your taste.

COMBATSIM.COM RATING : 80

Core Rating : 80 (Involved Strat Game)
Gameplay : 85
Graphics : 65
Sound : 65
Intelligence/AI : 80
User Interface/Mission Planner : 80
Fun Factor : 85 (once you get used to speed)
Learning Curve (in hours) : 4-6 hours
Overall Rating : 80

Download the patch HERE.