What are the top 10 World War II games (any genre)?

[Louis_Cypher]

I'm looking to get back into strategy games, but include any genre including First Person Shooters.

Example: Hearts of Iron (grand strategy), Panzer General (turn-based strategy), Commandos (tactics), Company of Heroes (real time strategy), etc...

 

[fork]

Silent Hunter 3 is up there.
IL-2 Sturmovik as well.

 

[Jvegi]

Call of Duty 1 is also there.

 

[Ryzer]

Red Orchestra 2
Silent Storm
Hammer and Sickle
Company of Heroes 1
Battlefield 1942
Panzer General II
Blitzkrieg 1
Valkyria Chronicles

 

[Monk]

Also, Attack at Dawn:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/attack-at-dawn.143388/

 

[Victor1234]

Hearts of Iron 2 (or Arsenal of Democracy for polished experience, or Darkest Hour for modding potential).

Clash of Steel for quick and dirty strategy gameplay.

If you like the Pacific theater: War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition. If you don't like the Pacific, Operational Art of War III (it's got the most working WW2 scenarios).

Commandos 2 men of courage was the best out of that series.

Also a shout-out for Hidden & Dangerous. The mission intros alone were a work of art.

 

[Aemar]

Men of War: Assault Squad 2. It shits on Company of Heroes.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Thanks everyone.

For a bit of context, I was watching some YouTube documentary on the history of wargaming, starting with Kriegspiel. They showed some of the early boards, and strategic maps used in places like a US military academy. Formal historical wargaming looks interesting. It's been a long time since I've played any non-Warhammer RTS, but I play Grand Strategy and 4X quite regularily. I was really intrigued by the idea of getting deeper into it as a hobby, and wanna get into some of the more formal Kriegspiel descended stuff, with hexes, etc. But I'm open to anything, especially getting back into RTS, or squad tactics. WWII used to be a big interest for me, followed by Korea and Vietnam.

Anything from the Wargamer.com Steam curator list that stands out?

Some examples:











Also, what is the history of the Panzer General type tank genre, with hexes or squares? I was playing stuff like Command & Conquer around that time, so didn't really know much about the turn-based stuff. I'm guessing these are all quite closely inspired tabletop historical wargaming as a hobby? Did they ever have dedicated communities or popularity on the same order of magnitude as C&C?

 

[Victor1234]

Thanks everyone.

For a bit of context, I was watching some YouTube documentary on the history of wargaming, starting with Kriegspiel. They showed some of the early boards, and strategic maps used in places like a US military academy. Formal historical wargaming looks interesting. It's been a long time since I've played any non-Warhammer RTS, but I play Grand Strategy and 4X quite regularily. I was really intrigued by the idea of getting deeper into it as a hobby, and wanna get into some of the more formal Kriegspiel descended stuff, with hexes, etc. But I'm open to anything, especially getting back into RTS, or squad tactics. WWII used to be a big interest for me, followed by Korea and Vietnam.

Anything from the Wargamer.com Steam curator list that stands out?

Some examples:











Also, what is the history of the Panzer General type tank genre, with hexes or squares? I was playing stuff like Command & Conquer around that time, so didn't really know much about the turn-based stuff. I'm guessing these are all quite closely inspired tabletop historical wargaming as a hobby? Did they ever have dedicated communities or popularity on the same order of magnitude as C&C?

Panzer General was originally hexes. PG was regarded as beer & pretzels (ie, filthy casual) within the wargaming community for being streamlined but the first one was massively popular at the time so it clearly worked considering there are still games of that type being made today (Order of Battle, Panzer Corps, etc). That original community still lives on (in part), and PG's legacy does as well in the form of Open General:

http://forum.open-general.com/

As far as historical military wargaming, the whole point of it was to encourage outside the box thinking (sort of the opposite of how computer wargames have gone, which resemble puzzle games more and more). A key component was a formal ruleset but to also have umpires (like D&D DM) for flexibility. For the real wargaming experience, I'd recommend going to a megagame near you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megagame

If you're open to tabletop and interested in WW2 squad tactics, ASL is the king of serious wargaming. The VASSAL module for it is supposed to be great as well but I've never tried it myself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Squad_Leader

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Thanks, that's informative.

Also really interesting to read that Star Fleet Battles, a Star Trek game, was influencial on ASL. It's a bit like Dune influencing the entire RTS genre via Dune II by Westwood.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Here is the video:



These are the passages I found interesting in that ASL Wiki article:

Despite the price tag and the expensive lists of prerequisites for each new module, the game system caught on and new modules continued to be produced twenty-five years after the original release - joining Dungeons & Dragons and Star Fleet Battles as one of what were known as "The Big Three" games of the hobbyist game industry.​

Wow. Star Fleet Battles was so foundational? As a Trekkie, I had no idea it's relative influence, but it does turn up a lot.

The ASL Rulebook was reformatted away from the traditional Avalon Hill format used in their smaller games. The ASL Rulebook was modeled after Amarillo Design Bureau's Star Fleet Battles rulebook, a format that better supported the "massive" game that ASL had become.​

 

[JarlFrank]

Men of War: Assault Squad 2. It shits on Company of Heroes.

I just wish it had a proper campaign, or at least an AI that can handle more than just the simple attack & defense maps the game comes with.

There's a bunch of really good gameplay mods, sadly most come without single player maps so you need to play with friends.

 

[Falksi]

It's dumb, but it is dumb fun. Don't let the EA stamp put you off, for a brain-dead blast or dick about in a sandbox world, this is a groovy little game...

 

[Viata]

YouTube documentary on the history of wargaming, starting with Kriegspiel

Link.
Edit: Just saw it above, ignore this post.

 

[Sranchammer]

You won't find anything seriously good outside boardgames

 

[hayst]

If you can get War in the East 2 on sale, its a beefy turn based strategy game.

 

[Victor1234]

If you can get War in the East 2 on sale, its a beefy turn based strategy game.

Gary Grisby did some great beefy games back in the day that are still unmatched (War in the Pacific, Eagle Day & Bombing the Reich) but a hard disagree on this one. When you get this game or GG War in the West, you're not getting much better gameplay than Norm Kroger's Operational Art of War series, except if you buy that you get thousands of scenarios and when you buy this, only a handful. For War in the East 2, it's actually slightly worse gameplay wise than the equivalent Fire in the East (FITE) scenario from TOAW3. I don't know if they've ported it for TOAW4 though.

For example in WitE 2, the partisan war is handled via a garrison box and coded events, in TOAW 3, they appear on the map directly and can blow up random bridges/cut railroads instead of pre-defined ones.

 

[DemonKing]

From what I've played:

Top tier:

Company of Heroes series
Commandos series
Medal of Honor Allied Assault

Middle Tier:

Battlefield 1942 & V
Call of Duty (original & II, World at War, World War II)
Red Orchestra
Day of Defeat
Castle Wolfenstein (FPS) & Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Average:

Medal of Honor (Pacific Assault, Airborne)
Sniper Elite series
Call of Duty Vanguard (campaign was ok but they they fumbled the multiplayer by having no distinguishing characteristics between sides and taking out the War mode)
Brothers in Arms series
Wolfenstein 2009 and Nu-Wolfenstein

Haven't played enough Hell Let Loose yet to really judge but it has potential even though when I've played I seem to spend a lot of time moving vast distances and then dying to a shot out of nowhere (probably realistic but not really fun).

 

[jebsmoker]

graviteam's games are great if you want something that's easy to grasp but hard to master

 

[Ol' Willy]

Steel Panthers: Word at War. Very good battalion level wargame, but AI is absolutely braindead in most of the cases

 

[Ol' Willy]

Brothers in Arms series

BiA average? Dude, this is the only tactical shooter with proper suppression and flanking system

 

[Üstad]

Red Orchestra 2

 

[None]

Surprised no one mentioned it, but Unity of Command 2. Relatively simple and straightforward to play, but can be very engaging.

 

[Raghar]

Panzer corps 2. (Great map, but lack global strategy map and it's just reimagination of famous battles linked in campaign.)
Strategic command WWII. (It has loyal MP community. But it has massive flaws. If you want to play single player as Germany more than once, mod national morale for US, UK, and Russia by 100000 more. And set hard difficulty, but reduce unit XP to normal otherwise combat would feel weird. Also I'm not sure if +2 enemy sight distance isn't too much, +1 is kinda doable if you have plan for your submarines. Actually they changed the very interesting perk of the game, when rain was NO GO for any bombing or interception. Which allowed side which didn't have air cover to do some interesting maneuvers when enemy planes were grounded. It kinda increased variability.)
HoI2. (It's decent game, even if dated. It has great archive of very techincal WWII discusions when players went on Paradox forums into great details, and tried to recalculate REAL steel use for transport, and submarine. And found HoI2 has too cheap transports, and too expensive submarines. I learned, game developer should simulate when possible, otherwise it would be prone to abuse. However, HoI2 is too abstracted.)
HoI4. (Older versions with just few DLCs were interesting and very variable. Newer versions doesn't feel like that. Also they nerfed artillery. It has great mod called Kaiserreich. So if you are into weird stuff, you can play it just for that.)

Steel Panthers. (It's still one of best games that simulates tank armor.)
Uboat. (They should add other types of submarines. And they should create a dynamic campaign map. C'mon, high school dropouts were able to create dynamic campaign in 90s.)

Panzer Generals games are dated, but people who made them had talent and it shows even today.

 

[Cross]

Valkyria Chronicles

World War II