Battle of Britain (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.7 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alan Dunkin
• Reviewed on: 05/04/1999
• Updated on: 05/01/2000
• Released on: 02/28/1999

Gary Grigsby is one of the best-known names in computer wargaming - he created a whole slew of great games for SSI, like Pacific War, Russian Front, Carrier Strike, and the Steel Panthers series. One game, U.S.A.A.F., was a day-by-day blow-by-blow strategic simulation of running the bombing campaign over the Third Reich in World War II from 1943 to 1945. U.S.A.A.F. was a great game, and so when Grigsby and Steel Panthers cocreator Keith Brors signed with Talonsoft to develop new wargames, the topic of doing a remake of sorts for U.S.A.A.F. inevitably came up. The result is Battle of Britain, an interesting design of the vital air campaign over England in 1940. Like all Grigsby games, Battle of Britain doles out plenty of detail but leaves much room for improvement.

The game premise is simple enough: You have control of your respective country's air force (Britain or Germany) during a set time period. This means that you will designate where the squadrons are based, what targets or patrol areas they will cover, and when they fly. Battle of Britain offers several types of campaigns, ranging from single-day affairs to ones that can last a week, a month, or several months. Two different time periods, the historical battle starting in August 1940 and a hypothetical German strategic bombing campaign in 1941, are also offered.

The campaign objectives for each side are quite different. The British player must defend the country against bombing attacks but at the same time manage and protect his precious RAF squadrons from decimation due to combat, aircraft loss, and fatigue. The German player on the other hand must bomb the British player into submission and diminish the RAF any chance he gets. While the British player must manage his squadrons efficiently, the German player must manage his bombing campaign down to a fine detail - though the AI can improvise and help out somewhat in the planning. Beginners should try out the one-day and one-week scenarios from the British side in learning the game, though these scenarios do tend to lean toward the Germans in the victory-conditions area.

The bulk of the game takes place over a map of the United Kingdom and northwestern Europe, showing a nice geographic look of the terrain, with symbols depicting various airfields, towns, factories, electrical stations, and so forth, as well as animated icons for the aircraft and raid sightings. Each side starts the day in a preplanning mode, moving around squadrons or doing some basic management. The German player does all the planning for the day in this stage, while the British player, depending on his strategy, may elect to do not much of anything. The day then evolves in phased real time - that is, in game terms, on a minute-by-minute basis. At any point you may pause and give further orders, so there is no advantage in being fast on the click. Of course, the disadvantage is that there is a lot of clicking.

The problem lies in the fact that, as in many other Grigsby designs, the interface, while at least looking somewhat manageable, is not particularly user friendly. Certain pieces of information are only available in certain functions or modes, causing you to cancel an action - say, the intercepting raids function - just to find out which squadron a nearby group of friendly aircraft happens to be in. Other functions bring up windows that blot out the map almost entirely, blocking out pertinent strategic information. When the map gets messy and full of plane icons (which happens quite a lot), it can be hell trying to sort through the different layers and stacks of planes, which can become all the more annoying when you forget something and can't access the stack from a game function.

To be sure, Battle of Britain is brimming with detail. All the available British and German squadrons are in the game, along with literally thousands of pilots and statistics to boot. Aircraft have a number of real-world and arbitrary attributes assigned to them (unfortunately, there's little explanation as to how the attributes came about) and range from the common Hurricane and Bf-109e aircraft to the more notable Bf-110c and rare Defiant aircraft. It's all there, if you want to sort through it, though it does have a bit of role-playing appeal to it, fine tuning your squadrons and watching out for potential aces.

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