Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath

As far as historical real strategy is concerned, World War II is almost played out. The Blitzkrieg series and Codename Panzers have covered the ground pretty well, as have lesser entries like Desert Rats v. Afrika Korps. So if you want to make a twentieth century historical RTS, what can you do to set yourself apart? After crashing through Belgium a dozen times and liberating the Ukraine a dozen more, what new experiences are left for the players you want to bring to your game?

One option is to make your own history. Create a world where armor and artillery face each other in a conventional war separate from the heavy mantle of the past and write your own campaigns to match this alternate timeline. So imagine a world where President Kennedy doesn't quarantine Cuba, but instead attacks it, leading to a nuclear exchange that divides a bipolar world into four competing alliances.

This is one of the two big ideas of Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath. The other idea is a stroke of genius that has the potential to truly change RTS altogether. Sometimes, however, two big ideas just aren't enough.

Cuban Missile Crisis is generous. It has four long campaigns---one for each of the competing factions. The campaigns begin with a run-down of what has happened since the nuclear exchange of the mid-60s, including such nice alternate history gems as a Franco-German alliance being squeezed between the Anglo-American forces and a hungry Soviet Union, and the nuclear decapitation of China leading to anti-Maoist forces seizing power and pushing for more influence in Asia.

Like many strategy games with a compelling backstory, though, little of it really makes much of an appearance. The campaigns dictate which forces you will be fighting in any given situation, but that’s about it. There is remarkably little fallout on most of the maps, and very few ruins. Most of the cities you encounter, in fact, are in prime condition until you start chucking shells into them. But four campaigns with unique units for each side means that there is a lot of replayability even in the absence of a skirmish mode.

Cuban Missile Crisis campaigns run in two phases. The first phase is the other big idea mentioned above. RTS campaigns tend to be pretty drab affairs. They usually march you from scenario to scenario with little input from your actions. Sure, some of your troops may get experience, but you are told where to go and, generally speaking, what forces you will use when you get there. This game's campaign phase, though, depends on user input. In a turn-based mode, the player recruits new units and moves whatever armies he/she has towards whatever objectives are most important. If your army is low on oil, you can drive towards an enemy refinery. Spare parts and ammo dumps will become very attractive goals. Once your armies reach these objectives, you will be dropped into a real-time battle between the forces you brought and whatever the computer rolls up for an opposing force.

As a campaign mechanic, it is pure genius. The player has control over the pace of the advance and can choose with great precision what the force composition will look like. If you want armies heavy on self-propelled guns, you can do this and see the effect in the real time combat.

And that's where things start to come apart. First, the choices available to you in the campaign planning phase vanish once the shooting starts. There are shockingly few maps available and a very limited number of missions. If you have to take a radar station or ammo dump, you will always have a choice of two bridges. If you have to take a bridge, you will have a single road to the goal and, inevitably, two or three rows of trenches to pass by. You will begin to guess where the enemy is holed up and defeat the entire purpose of the setup by hitting from a flank instead of marching into the crossfire. Even the main scenario missions have little to separate themselves from your run-of-the-mill battlefield encounter.

Despite the endless variety of vehicles, artillery is really the king of the battlefield, here. The side with the most long range guns will usually win. And death will rain on your head from howitzers you can't see. Anti-tank guns seem to be everywhere, too, so you will learn to depend on your infantry for their reconnaissance ability. Infantry officers can use binoculars to scout ahead and give you a hint of the precise position of the enemy guns.

But, typically, this is the limit of infantry utility. Boots on the ground may be the crucial factor in real warfare, but in your run-of-the-mill RTS, infantry is cannon fodder. The only real use for them is the manning of trenches where they are slightly protected from the armor that will eventually winnow their numbers. Grenadiers are very good at taking out tanks, or they would be if you could easily tell them apart from the other infantry under your command.

Cuban Missile Crisis is built on the Blitzkrieg engine so anyone familiar with it will be comfortable. The landscapes run the seasonal gamut. Autumn browns, spring greens, winter whites---all in standard shades. Since most of the maps are wide open plains, there is little need for too much finesse in the greenery and cityscapes.

A lot of attention is given to making each vehicle look like its Cold War original. Most tanks look the same to me, but the big tanks look big and the medium ones look medium. Your fuel trucks and ambulances are instantly recognizable. No such luck with the infantry, which remains a mess of green blobs that look vaguely like men. Is that a sniper or an officer? Where's my grenadier? The tiny print in the corner that identifies the troop type is not much help.

The sound is functional. Things blow up real good, and the soldiers speak in their native languages. My lack of working Chinese or Russian means that I can't always tell exactly what my little army guys are saying, but the tones and context means that I can get the gist of it pretty easily.

As mentioned above, important text is too small. The same can be said for the interface in general. The command buttons are tiny and the rollover text that accompanies them is even tinier.

But if you can get past that, the interface works just as would be expected. You have your default left select/right move and no fancy attempts to be novel or original. Path finding can be a problem, especially if there is a traffic jam on a bridge, but this does force you to plan ahead more than you normally would in such a game.

Cuban Missile Crisis comes on two disks. The installation was smooth and uneventful.

The familiarity of the game's interface makes an in-depth manual unnecessary, but it would have been nice to have some of the backstory color in it. The game's tutorial is thorough, but barely adequate in preparing you for how difficult the game can be if you don't look across the bridge before you cross it.

More attention is given to weapon descriptions than one would expect in a game like this. Some people find this sort of thing fascinating. I was mostly wishing they would have spent some of that time on new maps.

It's kind of appropriate that a “what-if" history game raises feelings of "what might have been!" The history of gaming is littered with the remains of titles with one or two great ideas that were attached to an average core game. You can add Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath to that list. The turn-based campaign interface is original enough that other strategy game developers should look at it and learn how to get players involved in creating their own RTS wars.