![]() ![]() Dust plumes rise from vehicles plowing across fields, over hills, along roads. And once the shooting starts, the cities and lands show the cruel fate of war, exploding and burning, convincingly devastated by the combat taking place upon their backs. The details make the cities feel real, even though at this point there are no civilian inhabitants modeled in the game (it’s unclear if there ever will be). ![]() In those towns, cars sit abandoned with doors ajar, their occupants clearly having fled in the face of existential threats raining down from above. ![]() But with a scroll of the mouse wheel, you can zoom in anywhere, from blades of grass and individual trees to the smallest of buildings in the towns that dot the map. Zoomed out to the fullest extent, the bird’s eye view gives a vantage point with which to plan your strategy in broad strokes. Though not the most important part of an RTS, the graphics are a good place to start, and they are truly fantastic, beginning with the landscapes themselves. The hardware is all pulled from reality, appropriate for the late-80s setting of course, with the attention to detail the developer is known for at the very center of the experience. Skirmish allows anywhere from two to twenty players (the ones who aren't you are AI-controlled) to duke it out on roughly 8 maps representing a gorgeously handcrafted, virtual West German landscape, with painstakingly created real-world hardware to do all the shooting and exploding. Multi-player is working in some fashion, though I did not test it and the creation of an account with Eugen is required to use it. The game’s Skirmish mode is the only single-player option available as of writing. The game is in the earliest of Early Access states, so these impressions come from a very small slice of the full package. WARNO envisions a World War III scenario in Cold War-era Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. There is a massive amount of promise in this real-time strategy(RTS) title, with a solid track record from developer Eugen Systems pointing, eventually, toward a fascinating playground for Cold War grognards. And it does bring them to life, in vivid fashion. A lifelong reader of Tom Clancy novels and various other technothrillers, the scenes that WARNO brings to life have been played out in my imagination for more than 30 years. That having been said, I am 100% the target audience for this game. But such is human nature, the relentless need for power and prestige, so we are once again reliving the past in the present day. It’s an eerie feeling, to review a game that brings to life an imagined Cold War-era conflict in Europe while an actual Cold War-reminiscent conflict is happening in Ukraine. ![]()
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