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Above the Kall Trail in the Huertgen Forest

Vossenack, Kommerscheidt, Hürtgen, Schmidt – the names of these German villages are better known in the US than in Germany. If you tell your co-workers in Germany that you will spend your next weekend in the Huertgen Forst, they will give you a weird look and ask you: “Where? Where is that?”

The reason why this region and the Battle of Huertgen Forst are almost unknown to the average German citizen is the fact that this battle “didn’t take place”. Actually, when the Americans got over the Siegfried Line and crossed the German border, Hitler was deep into his preparations for the Ardennes offensive. The fact that Allied soldiers had entered the German homeland was a disaster for German propaganda – which was anxious to make the public believe that the Allies were held up in the West, in France and Belgium. So this battle was swept under the carpet and the German public was told that the Allies were stalled somewhere in the West. The locals of the Huertgen Forest were evacuated, so there were no eyewitnesses to the events in the region, and it was prohibited to talk about what happened there.

The Battle is still very present in the forest. Here: US armor tracks, melted into the ground

The Battle in the Huertgen Forest was one of the bloodiest battles in World War II, it was the longest single battle ever fought by US forces and the trench warfare character of this Battle made it known as “the Verdun of WWII”. Veterans of Huertgen Forest stated that this battle was bloodier than the landings at Omaha Beach. Nevertheless, even today many Germans never heard about the Battle of the Huertgen Forest or could locate this region on a map.

The Huertgen Forest (German: Hürtgenwald) is located in the far West of Germany, close to the Belgian border, in the National Park Eifel close to the Belgian National Park  Hohes Venn, South of the cities of Aachen and Düren and north of Monschau.

Fortunately, the Hürtgenwald region is very active in commemorating history. Even today, people in Vossenack or Schmidt are still living with the after-effects of the battle: Some areas are still mined because there are almost no maps left showing the position of the minefields. In addition, there were also glass and wood mines used which cannot be detected by metal detectors. You are advised not to leave the signposted routes in the forest, and if you want to build a house, first thing you do is call an explosive disposal team to check the ground. Each year, the remains of about 7 soldiers are discovered in the forests and fields.

The Battle is still present everywhere in the region. In Vossenack is the Hürtgenwald 1944 museum which is maintained by the private “Historical Society Hürtgenwald in 1944 and in peace”. There are many memorials all over the place, for US soldiers as well as for Germans. One memorial is quite special: it is a memorial for a German officer donated by US soldiers.

Following the Kall Trail down into the steep Kall valley

You can follow the infamous (well sign-posted) “Kall Trail” down into the forest where many remains of the Battle are still visible today. There are two large German war cemeteries in Vossenack and Hürtgen (US soldiers were buried in cemeteries outside Germany, for example in Belgium and the Netherlands, or transferred back home).

The German veteran organization “Windhunde” (former members of the 116th Panzer Division (“Windhunde”) and their families, friends and descendants) is still very active in commemorating the Battle. They set up a large memorial next to the Vossenack cemetery, and they cooperate closely with US veterans. Each year in October there is a Remembrance Walk through the forest by US and German veterans, visitors, and citizens together with many events like an American style BBQ, meetings, and lectures.

We went to the Huertgen Forest in September, on a very sunny day, but when you walk deep down into the forest, you learn very soon that you wouldn’t want to spend an entire winter there. The forests are very steep, the ground consists of solid rocks, and the conifers forest is dense and dark.

As guide books, we used the “Militärgeschichtlicher Reiseführer” by Peter Többicke and the very good “Hürtgenwald 1944/1945 Militärgeschichtlicher Tourenplaner” by Rainer Monnartz. The last book is especially good and highly recommended if you can read German because it offers complete tours with location descriptions, photos, and even GPS coordinates, which proved to be very helpful.

Huertgen Forest then…

Ammunition, equipment, and dead soldiers are discovered each year - down to the present day

The Battles in the Huertgen Forest took place from 14th September 1944 – 10th February 1945. The reason why the US forces entered this almost impassable and rough terrain was that they wanted to push to the Rur river and to secure the Schwammelauel Dam which was located behind the mountains. They also wanted to secure the village of Schmidt in order to capture the city of Monschau, which was a German HQ.

The US forces underestimated the presence of the German forces – they couldn’t know that the Huertgen Forest was a staging area for the Battle of the Bulge planned for December 1944. In addition, the entire wood was mined and crisscrossed by trenches, barbed wire, and fortifications. Because of the rocky and steep terrain, it was almost impossible to cross the forest with tanks or heavy equipment, but the US neglected initial reconnaissance and so the 1st Army got trapped on the rocky and muddy “Kall Trail” deep in the forests with almost useless tanks which had to be abandoned in great numbers. In hindsight, military historians agree that the Huertgen Forest should have been avoided. Charles B. MacDonald, an US historian and former company commander who served in the battle stated that this Battle was “a misconceived and basically fruitless battle”.

Due to the difficult terrain, the American advantage in numbers became irrelevant and a small number of defenders could stall the US advance for months. In addition, the winter 1944 was extremely cold with early snow and heavy mud, and the Americans were completely unprepared to fight in cold weather. They were only supplied with summer equipment and clothing – while the German veterans with their experiences in Russia and places like Stalingrad had become quite accustomed to winter warfare.

A wayside cross in Vossenack, riddled by bullet holes

When the battle hardened US forces, which were sent in first, had been so reduced that they became combat ineffective, the US command decided not to retreat from the forest. Instead, they sent in inexperienced, green recruits, which led to even more casualties.

The US soldiers were forced to blast tank routes into the rocks which were blocking the small path along the steep slopes. Often enough, tanks lost their tank tracks or slipped down the slope or were even pushed down by soldiers when they became useless. It was quite easy for the highly mobile Germans with Panzerfausts and improvised rocket launchers to spot and attack targets and then to disappear into the woods again, while the Americans had difficulties to spot any targets at all. Due to the high trees, mortar or artillery support was also often unavailable to the US forces because of the danger of tree bursts.

The US 1st Army was opposed by roughly 5000 Germans with almost no artillery and no tanks at their disposal, but opposing to the US belief that these Germans were weak and would retreat soon, they successfully stalled the US advance for months. Control over towns like Vossenack switched about 28 times between both sides.

…and today

The villages were rebuilt from scratch after the war, there are almost no historical pre-war buildings left. This is the rebuilt church of Vossenack

While the mountainous dense forest may be a very idyllic sight today, and the area is marked as a climatic health resort, the villages in the Huertgen Forest are not very attractive.

Not much was left of Vossenack, Kommerscheidt or Schmidt after the battle, so all villages had to be cleared of mines and rebuilt from scratch. If you see these villages today, you cannot believe that you are visiting 500 years old towns – they almost exclusively consist of faceless new buildings in typical 50′s style. There are no lively village centers, old buildings, or the typical half-timbered Eifel houses (as for example in picturesque  Monschau). The small Hürtgenwald villages appear very contemporary and somewhat cheerless. The fact that we entered Kommerscheidt on a Sunday afternoon, when all streets were deserted didn’t help, so we got the impression of entering a ghost town.

The surrounding National Park Eifel is a beautiful recreation area with old timber work villages, seas, old volcanoes, forests, and mountains. The closest historical towns are Monschau and Nideggen. Especially Monschau is well worth seeing and very popular among tourists from Belgium, France, and The Netherlands, so if you visit the Huertgen Forest, you should also visit Monschau, the Rur dams, and the NS Order Castle Vogelsang.

Siegfried Line

Translation: "Siegfried Line - enter at your own risk!"

In the entire region between Aachen and Monschau, you can see the dragon teeth of the Siegfried Line (German: “Westwall”). There is even a 12 km long “Westwall Wanderweg” (“Siegfried Line hiking route”) which leads from Simmerath in the Huertgen Forest to Monschau. Here, you can walk on and along the Siegfried Line, which is a must if you are a battlefield tourist.

The dragon teeth are still intact today, simply because it is too expensive to remove the massive concrete objects. Many are situated in private gardens, front yards or along the road and fields because people simply built around them. You are kindly advised by signs not to enter private backyards and gardens when following the Siegfried Line, but there are enough dragon teeth in the open for everyone to see and touch and climb.

When we came to the Huertgen Forest, our first stop was in Lammersdorf near Simmerath where the “Westwall Wanderweg” begins. There is a small parking lot, just large enough for one car, and a wooden sign showing the direction of the Siegfried Line next to the road. You can’t miss the teeth, though – they are everywhere along the road.

Walking along the Siegfried Line

Dragon Teeth are everywhere along the road

Size comparison

More photos in our photo gallery!

Important! The museum only opens on Sundays from 11am - 5pm!

We then followed the route for a while, walking on the concrete bunker constructions of the Westwall which leads through fields and along a small rivulet. The dragon teeth here are overgrown with moss and plants, but you can freely walk between them, which is quite interesting and feels weird because you begin to realize that building them was such a weird project in the first place. If you think about the endless rows of dragon teeth, hundreds of kilometers long, you cannot help but start wondering what an immense effort it must have been to build them.

Vossenack Hürtgenwald 1944 Museum

Mines are dangerous even today - before you build a house in the Huertgen Forest, you have to call a bomb disposal team to clear the ground

After returning from our walk along the Siegfried Line, we drove to Vossenack to visit the Hürtgenwald Museum. The museum is maintained by honorary volunteers and only open from March-November and only on Sundays (!) between 11 am – 5 pm, so time your visit well!

When we reached the museum, we were surprised about how lively it was, outside and inside. There were many cars in the parking lot, coming from all over Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Great Britain.

The entrance fee is moderate, 4 Euros for an adult (5 Euros if you take a guided tour, but guided tours are only offered occasionally, so we couldn’t join one). There is also a field hospital bunker which can be visited for an additional fee of 3 Euros, but since the entrance to this bunker is in the cellar of a private home, it is only open from time to time (one hour on Saturdays, I guess). The museum also offers guided military tours for schools, groups, or English tours for army personnel from other countries, but these have to be booked in advance, so it is quite difficult to get any official guide in the Hürtgenwald Museum. We explored the museum on our own.

The museum staff was very helpful, though; there was a bearded army retiree who was in charge that Sunday and he explained to us how the museum works and invited us to the annual Remembrance Walk and BBQ next weekend.

Much to discover in the Vossenack museum

In the museum, you can watch a documentation about the Hürtgenwald in a  cinema room. We watched for a few minutes and the documentation “You enter Germany – Bloody Huertgen and the Siegfried Line” was very good with lots of original footage, eyewitness reports and detailed information about the backgrounds. Since the documentation was about 90 minutes long, we then decided to buy the DVD (it was sold at the museum entrance, it is in German and English and well worth the money!) and watch it at home. If you can get your hands on a DVD, you should buy it (you can even order it from amazon.de because it is region free).

We then followed the circular route of the Museum which strongly reminded us of the Oorlogsmuseum 1944-45 in Arnhem. The museum displays findings from the area – German and US weapons, ammunition, mines, equipment. You can see uniforms and private possessions of soldiers, documents, and photographs. There are vehicles, tank tracks, parts of shot down aircraft, helmets, wall signs, and all kinds of things from the era.

The history of the battle is depicted on large wall charts with maps, everything is bi-lingual in German and English. There were many visitors from other countries, especially Americans, in the museum and the atmosphere was very open and friendly.

The museum displays findings from the forest and donated equipment from both sides

German hand grenades

Tank components can be found in the forest even today

Various types of German and US bombs and ammunition

Light mortar

US equipment

Visit our photo gallery for many more museum photos!

We spent about 2 hours in the museum and then we left to visit the actual battlefield.

Vossenack church and cemetery

Inside the church

We left our car at the museum and walked to the Parish Church St. Jozef in Vossenack. The church was completely destroyed during the battle and re-built after the war in a semi-old fashion. It is a Fatima pilgrim church containing a Madonna consecrated in Fatima and she is supposed to work miracles. Accordingly, the walls around the Madonna, who is located in the church entrance, is full with expressions of thanks by people who were helped by her in times of need. The new church bell was sponsored by the Windhunde panzer division and its chiming is meant to be a “reminder of peace”.

The church was the scenery of heavy fightings during the battles for Vossenack. On several occasion, control over the church was split in half between German and US soldiers, one faction shooting from the hall, the other from the sacristy or bell tower.

A cross, made from shrapnel

Inside the church, there is a huge colorful church window which was donated by the Windhunde division, together with a memorial plate remembering the war. On the church door, there is an inscription remembering the 68,000 Americans and Germans who were killed, wounded, fallen ill, captured, or missing in action during the fightings in and around Vossenack.

Behind the church is the church cemetery. This cemetery contains several war memorials, one directly behind the church commemorating the dead of both World Wars.

The most important and most impressive memorial is the crucifixion group in the central part of the cemetery. It is quite expressive and shows Jesus on a large crucifix who extends one arm to the desperate people below (two of them being Mary and John the Baptist). The inscription plate says: ““MEMORIAL FOR PEACE 8.5.1945 – 8.5.1985 - Remember the Dead – they’re asking for peace“. It was created by the Franciscan monk Laurentius Englisch and funded with donations.

The WWI - WWII memorial behind the church

The most famous memorial: The Crucifixion group

Down the Kall trail

Following the Kall Trail is very illuminating

Following the descriptions in our guide-book, we left the cemetery through a gate at the far end. After crossing some faceless village streets, we left Vossenack and reached a small path winding through fields of corn and cow pastures. Our guidebook hinted us at a small way cross with a base perforated by bullet holes. Watch out for it, it can be easily missed!

Vossenack is located on the back of a woodless hill, surrounded by pastures and fields. From the fields, you could see the dense, dark forest below which fills the steep valleys between Vossenack, Kommerscheidt, and Schmidt. On the opposing hill, separated by a deep valley filled with dense forest, you can see the village of Kommerscheidt (Schmidt isn’t visible from Vossenack). After passing some more cows, a signpost showed us the way to the forest entrance and to the Kall Trail.

The Kall Trail (it was named by the US soldiers) is a small, steep, rocky path leading down to the small river Kall deep below in the valley. Then, after crossing the Kall, the path winds up another hill, equally steep, equally rocky, up to the village Kommerscheidt.

This foxhole was the place of an US aid station, which was left alone by the Germans

Beginning in November 1944, the 112th US Infantry Regiment used this trail to press on towards Schmidt, but they neglected recon and so they missed the fact that the initially broad and comfortable way at the forest entrance soon changed into a small, steep path which was almost impassable for heavy equipment and tanks (it is even difficult to walk down there on foot). The US soldiers were stalled on the path and only with greatest efforts, they managed to move at least some tanks and equipment down into the valley and across the Kall river. For the Germans, these efforts could be easily disturbed with small ambushes and constant hit-and-run attacks.

The path soon became so narrow that engineers had to blast away massive rocks which blocked the way down. The blasted-off blocks of rocks are still visible between the trees below the path today.

In addition, the path was very muddy and it became impossible for the tanks to turn around on their axle, so driving along a curve was highly dangerous. Driving forwards and backwards in order to maneuver around a curve led to the destruction of armor tracks. In the end, many broken tanks were simply pushed down the steep slope to the left of the Kall trail, where they ended as wrecks.

The Kall Trail is very steep and rough

Walking down the path is difficult and exhausting even today, in sunny, dry weather and without enemy fire, and the path is so steep and narrow that we had difficulties to imagine how tanks were moved downwards at all – in the winter, in the mud (and later snow) and with rocks blocking the way. Walking down the original path was very illuminating indeed and is highly recommended because you will get a quite lively impression of the difficulties the Americans faced in 1944. Watch out, though – the rocky path is quite difficult to walk and you need good shoes with a good grip if you plan to follow the Kall Trail.

If you are handicapped, there is also an “easy way” down to the Kall river today, a paved road from Vossenack which leads to a popular tourist attraction next to the river Kall, the Mengener Mühle (Mengener Mill) where you can eat and drink, but fortunately, the original Kall trail is still intact and in original shape as it was in 1944.

Down in the Kall valley

Halfway down the trail, our guide-book brought a point of interest to our attention which could be easily missed: a foxhole, several meters up the steep slope to the right of the trail. We climbed up the slope and discovered the hole which was hidden among trees. A small wooden remembrance cross – the same type of crosses we saw everywhere across Arnhem – was left next to the place. This foxhole was originally hidden under a tarp and heavy logs which protected it from the air bursts. It served as an US field hospital where wounded from both sides were treated. Sometimes, German and US medics worked side by side. This aid station was left alone by the German Army during the battle after they had checked out that the US medics were unarmed.

Following the Kall Trail down, we crossed the new paved road several times where wanderers, mostly families with buggies, were on their way to the Mengener Mühle. From time to time, we met other battlefield tourists from several countries, which could easily be recognized by the Hürtgenwald books or maps they held in their hands.

After a while, we were down at the deepest part of the Kall valley, several hundred meters below our starting point. Next to the river, we could see the Mengener Mühle, which had changed ownership during the war several times. It had served as a German and US HQ, field hospital, and supply station. We didn’t visit the Mühle, but continued to follow the Kall Trail to the famous bridge.

Kall bridge

Memorial on the Kall bridge: "A Time for Healing"

The Huertgen Forest Battlefield Tourist can easily be recognized by his maps and guide books

The Kall stone bridge was built by US forces who needed this bridge to move their tanks over the small river. The original bridge was destroyed during the war and rebuilt after the war.

In November 2004, a memorial was placed on the massive bridge railing: “A Time for Healing”, together with an information board in English and German. The information board describes the historical events which took place on this bridge from November 7 to 12 in 1944. Here, German regimental doctor Captain Dr. Stüttgen managed to negotiate an inofficial ceasefire with the US forces to treat all wounded from both sides at the bridge. During the armistice, German paramedics took care of all German and US wounded soldiers on and around the bridge.

After the war, Dr. Stüttgen was honored by the Governor of Pennsylvania. A painting of the event called “A Time for Healing” can be seen in the Museum of the National Guard. A copy of the painting is in the Vossenack museum.

An information board tells the story of the Kall bridge

Up the Kall trail 

Reading background information

US Armor tracks

After crossing the Kall bridge, we followed the Kall trail up the next hill which leads to the village of Kommerscheidt. The way is as steep and rocky as the way down and quite exhausting.

Half way up is another point of interest: US armor tracks, melted into the road. In this place, three trapped US tanks were destroyed by the Germans. The German soldiers were very happy when they discovered that the tanks were full of supplies: field rations, chocolate, cigarettes, cookies, and meat cans. One soldier, a young company runner who became friends with his US counterparts after the war, remembered that they discovered a tin with unknown stuff inside… which tasted quite good. After the war he learned that this were crunched peanuts and when he met the US soldiers on a veteran meeting for the first time, the tank commander brought him a box of peanuts as a present – something he never forgot.

On top of the hill, near the village Kommerscheidt and next to a mountain shelter, is an overlook with a small bank, perfect for taking a break. Here, you have a perfect view over the Kall valley and the dense forests between the treeless hills.

Kommerscheidt

The grave at the village entrance

At the entrance to the village Kommerscheidt is the grave of US Staff Sergeant Lemuel H Herbert. The grave is decorated with a cross and a photo, but it is empty today because Herbert’s body was transferred to the US after the war. Still, the grave is well-kept and serves as a memorial today.

We entered the village of Kommerscheidt and were somewhat underwhelmed. This isn’t Kommerscheidt’s fault, of course, the village is about 600 years old, but it was the site of a heavy tank battle and almost nothing was left from the original village. Today, it is another faceless, 50′s style village without a city center or anything of interest – besides large single-family homes. We came to the conclusion that building a house in the Hürtgenwald must be quite cheap because all houses are somewhat oversized and built in weird villa or mediterranean styles, together with large properties and gardens. Since the area is still mined and you have to check for explosives before building a house, the Hürtgen Forest appears to be a popular living place or satellite suburb for commuters or young families without much income who work in the cities of Aachen, Düren or Nideggen, where property is much more expensive.

There and back again... a look into the steep, densely wooded Kall valley

Unfortunately, we were under the wrong impression that the tour we had picked from our guide-book was a circular tour – in Kommerscheidt, we discovered that our tour ended with a description of the tank battle. So we realized that we were trapped in Kommerscheidt – our car was still in the parking lot in Vossenack, which was located on the next hill. We had a direct LOS to the village, but – historically accurate – we were separated from our destination by a valley filled with dense forest and a steep Kall trail…

We decided to check for a bus back to Vossenack, but the first problem was that there were no natives anywhere… the streets were deserted, apart from another couple with a Hürtgenwald guide-book, who looked as lost as we did. We walked up the main street and discovered a young girl who stared as us with surprised eyes. When we asked here for the next bus stop, she was quite confused and stammered something about her school bus. We then discovered the bus stop in front of the only (closed) pub in Kommerscheidt and had to learn that there are two busses a day, destination Schmidt, and the last bus left hours ago.

There was only one choice left: We had to walk back the entire Kall Trail to Vossenack, down to the river and up the rocky, steep slope to Vossenack…

Vossenack War Cemetery

The Windhunde Memorial near Vossenack

Dead soldiers are never alone...

It was 5 pm when we reached the parking lot and the museum (which was closed by then). It was too late to visit the Ochsenkopf, another valley filled with dense forest, and to visit the memorials and bunkers which are located there. We decided to visit at least the two war cemeteries before dusk.

The Vossenack War Cemetery is located outside Vossenack on the strategically important “Hill 470″. This hill was the scenery of heavy fightings and changed ownership several times during the war. There is a lookout next to the road where you have a great view over Vossenack and, if weather permits, you can see as far as the area around Cologne.

The cemetery contains the remains of 2347 Germans. 100 of them are members of bomb disposal teams who died after the war when defusing mines and explosives.

Vossenack War Cemetery

This cemetery has a very special history. German Captain Julius Erasmus went to the Huertgen Forest after the war, after he had lost his entire family in the Battle for Aachen, and was shocked by the bodies of dead soldiers lying around everywhere in the woods. It preyed on his mind, so he began to identify and bury them by himself, searching the burning woods and active minefields for bodies and burying them near the forest edge. When he had buried 120 dead soldiers, the village of Vossenack allowed him to use the village cemetery.

In the end, Julius Erasmus (who soon went by the name “Totengräber von Vossenack” = “Grave-Digger of Vossenack”) had buried 1569 dead soldiers on his own. He wrote down the names and dates of the dead, drew maps of their burial places and marked all graves with simple wooden crosses.

Vossenack War Cemetery

In 1949, the war cemetery Vossenack was built on Hill 270 and all dead German soldiers were transferred there. The administration of Vossenack offered Erasmus a house in the town, but he preferred to remain in his small wooden hut in the forest, close to the cemetery. He died in 1971. A memorial at the cemetery entrance commemorates his work.

Many soldiers in this cemetery were never identified, so the inscription on their gravestones is simply “Unknown soldier”.

A curiosity: The grave of Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model who committed suicide in April 1945

In front of the cemetery is a parking lot. From there, we first went to the “Windhunde Memorial” next to the cemetery. The 116th Windhunde Panzer Division installed a monument with the inscription “Tote Soldaten sind niemals allein, denn immer werden treue Kameraden bei ihnen sein” (“Dead soldiers are never alone because their comrades will always be with them“). Information boards next to the memorial tell the story of the 116th Division with photos and text (which is, unfortunately, written in German only).

The graves on the Vossenack war cemetery are marked with simple stone plates on the grounds. Two soldiers share a grave and a stone. The most prominent person buried on this cemetery is Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model who committed suicide in April 1945 (still convinced of the superiority of National Socialism).

The atmosphere on the cemetery was quite peaceful but somewhat grim, due to the heavy black basaltic stones which were used for the crosses and for the central memorial.

Remembering Julius Erasmus, "the grave-digger of Vossenack"

Hürtgen War Cemetery

The Lt. Lengfeld Memorial

"Kameradenkreuze" or "Comrade-Gravestones"

We then drove to the War Cemetery near the village of Hürtgen. It was built on the largest minefield in the entire Hürtgen region, named “Wilde Sau” (wild sow). The cemetery contains the remains of 3001 dead, among them 2925 German soldiers, 35 civilians, 27 Russians, 13 Polish, and 1 Belgian. 560 dead are still unidentified.

The shell limestone gravestones on this cemetery are quite remarkable: They are built as so-called “comrade-gravestones”, consisting of two adjoined crosses each.

At the entrance is a memorial for German Lt. Friedrich Lengfeld, sponsored by veterans of the US 4th Inf. Division in 1994. On November 12, 1944 Lt. Lengfeld tried to rescue an American soldier who was laying wounded in the Wilde Sau minefield and was crying for help. In his attempt to rescue the American soldier, Lengfeld was also severely wounded and died shortly after.

Huertgen War Cemetery

The cemetery is not as symmetric as other cemeteries, but is built inside an idyllic little forest with curved rows of crosses. When we left the cemetery, it was getting dark already.

There is still much to discover in the Huertgen Forest, for example bunkers, the village Schmidt, and the Ochsenkopf valley where several US and German memorials are placed deep inside the forest. So one day, we will certainly visit the Huertgen Forest again!

Visiting this battlefield was very interesting and the battle is still very present everywhere in the forests and villages. You have to plan your trip carefully, though, if you want to visit the Vossenack museum which is only open on Sundays from Spring to Autumn, and you need a good guide-book and maps if you want to find all hidden places and memorials (or a local guide, which is even better!).

With some preparation, a trip to the Huertgen Forest will be a very impressive and vivid experience!

And don’t forget to visit our photo gallery with many more photos from this great trip!

John Frost Bridge as seen from the Airborne Memorial

This summer, we decided to visit the battlefield of the largest airborne operation in Europe during World War II: The Arnhem region in The Netherlands, scenery of “Operation Market Garden” in September 1944. As a guide-book, we used “A Tour of the Arnhem Battlefields” by John Waddy.

Arnhem then…

The main idea behind Market Garden was the seizing of the most important bridges across the rivers Rhine and Maas which would allow the advancing Allied ground forces to flank the Siegfried Line and to march straight towards the important industrial areas in Germany.

Original bridge pillar

British, Canadian, Polish, and US paratroopers got the objective of capturing bridges between the Dutch cities of Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and Arnhem. The first bridges could be seized successfully, but the bridge in Arnhem was “one bridge too far”, so that the Allied forces suffered a disastrous defeat and had to retreat under heavy losses – which prolonged the war and led to the “Hungerwinter” of 1944 where 18.000 Dutch civilians starved to death due to the fact that the Germans cut off the supply to the Netherlands as a retribution for the Dutch support and aid of the Allied landings.

What went wrong in Arnhem? Well, the most important mistake was to underestimate the German presence in the area. Allied intelligence suspected that the German forces were scattered, poorly equipped, and that some of the spotted tanks were dummies or decoys. As a matter of fact, the German forces around Arnhem were the II SS Panzer Corps, consisting of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions who were drawn back behind safe frontlines to be resupplied and refitted. So the Allied forces met some of the few remaining German elite forces at Arnhem, restored to full strength and equipped with all kinds of heavy equipment.

The British paratroopers of the 1st Parachute brigade became trapped at the Bridge of Arnhem and surrounded by heavy German troops. The trapped soldiers were shelled by mortars, artillery, and tanks, while most of the attempts to relieve or even evacuate the men were in vain. Lt. Colonel John Frost and his troops defended the Bridge to the last bullet for several days, until they ran out of ammunition.

…and today

You can follow the "Liberation Route" through Arnhem

In and around Arnhem, Operation Market Garden is still very present. You can find memorials all over the area, even in private front yards, and all memorials are well-kept and decorated with fresh flowers or small wooden crosses with personal notes like “we will always remember”. Each year in September, the “Airborne Wandeltocht” (“Airborne March”) takes place which is the world’s largest 1-day marching event. The march is attended by civilians, visitors from all over the world, military, veterans, and police. The route is along the drop zones and battlefields of Market Garden in the area around Arnhem and Oosterbeek.

There are two important museums, and you can even follow the “Liberation Route” around Arnhem which leads you to the most important sites which are extensively described on information boards in English, Dutch, and German. The boards also show photos from the era and of the respective location during the war. In addition, there is the “Perimeter route” around Oosterbeek which is also well signposted.

The area around Arnhem is so rich with history that you should bring enough time. One or two days certainly aren’t enough if you want to visit all important sites and memorials. We spent three days in Arnhem and we will certainly return there one day to see more of this very interesting and fascinating region with their friendly and open-minded people.

Getting to Arnhem

History is very present all over Arnhem

Arnhem is located at the Rhine river, close to the German border. The city is easy to reach by train or car. We went there by car and were somewhat shocked about the fuel prices in the Netherlands which are even higher than the prices in Germany (1 liter for 1,69 Euro which is 9 Dollar per gallon… welcome to Europe ). In addition, parking is nearly unpayable in the Arnhem city center (where our hotel was located) – one hour costs 2,50 Euro and there are no free public parking lots anywhere. On our first day, we managed to get one of the ultra-rare private parking spaces behind our hotel, but since we left next day for a trip to Oosterbeek, our parking space was gone when we returned. We then parked our car on one of the public parking lots and decided that we didn’t understand Dutch and that we didn’t understand how the ticket machine worked… we were lucky, and didn’t get a parking violation ticket, but the situation wasn’t very satisfying.

Our Hotel, the Best Western Hotel Haarhuis, was located right in the center of Arnhem, next to the train station, the entertainment district, and the  pedestrial shopping area.  The weather on day 1 was horrible, it was cold, stormy and rainy and the wind blew our umbrellas away. Fortunately, the sun came out and days 2 and 3 were perfect.

On the "John Frost Bridge" in Arnhem

John Frost Bridge

Nevertheless, we didn’t have time to lose, so after checking in, we faced the horrible weather and walked to the John Frost Bridge, the Bridge of Arnhem which was rebuilt in the original fashion after WWII.

On our way to the bridge, along the Rhine river bank, we reached the first Airborne Memorial, a plateau with several information boards, a viewpoint to the bridge together with a photograph of the original bridge, a bomb and a Canadian Fickes-Armstrong 25 pounder.

Close to the bridge is the “Slag of Arnhem / Battle of Arnhem Info Center”, which is not a museum but, as the name suggests, a place which offers information about the bridge and the battle. There is no entrance fee but you can donate money if you want to. The staff consists of unpaid volunteers. You can freely take pictures with flashlight.

Canadian 25-pounder

When we entered the (small but very interesting)  information center, we were greeted by a very friendly dutch woman who was addressing us in Dutch. When she realized that we were German, she switched to German and welcomed us to the center. She then gave us a short introduction and explained to us how to visit the exhibition. She then turned on a beamer which projected a cinematic overview over the events on Sept 17-27, 1944 onto a large table. Projected on the table was a map of the Arnhem region with animated arrows and icons showing the movements of all units (very informative, especially for a wargamer!). In addition, there was an (English) commentary from hidden speakers.

Inside the info center

After the introduction (about 5 minutes), we were free to explore the exhibition. The large room was divided into several sections, portraying the participating parties – the US, the British, the Polish, the Germans, and the Dutch civilians. There were quotes and pictures and life careers and eyewitness testimonies of individual people, and short movies with original material on small screens with headphones.

All information on the boards is printed in English and Dutch, but the guide gave us a printed handout with a German translation of all material of the exhibition. Great service for German visitors who are not so fluent in other languages, for example old German WWII veterans (who became friends with British and US veterans after the war and who also contributed pictures, interviews, and equipment to the information center and to the museums around Arnhem).

Info center

Everything is multi-lingual and the guide adapts to each visitor. At first, we were alone in the information center, but after a short while, a British couple entered the room and was greeted in English by the guide who gave them the same introduction we got some minutes before. Then, more people came, some Americans, some Dutch.

All in all, we met no Germans on our tour. Apparently, Germans tend to visit the Netherlands for cheap shopping and vacation at the North Sea, but the Netherlands as a historical site appears to be fairly unknown. The historical sites were highly frequented by visitors from English-speaking countries (even the mandatory annoying, disinterested, marauding school-classes from Great Britain we had also encountered at the Remagen bridge) and by Dutch tourists. The British, Canadian, American, and Dutch visitors were very friendly and highly interested and we didn’t have the slightest problem with being from Germany, on the contrary. The museum staff always made an effort to explain everything in German to us (which isn’t one of the easiest languages!), and they were very relieved when we talked English with them. With the beginning of the second day, we directly approached them in English to spare them the cruel effort of translating everything into German for us.

But back to the information center… Outside, the weather became worse and it was storming and raining. The center became quite crowded but the guide still tried to welcome each visitor personally and in a language of their choice. Admirable!

John Frost Memorial

After spending some time in the exhibition, we left the building and decided to climb the John Frost bridge (which is heavy with traffic). The rain was lashing and there were strong gusts, so it was somewhat difficult to revere the historical place we were standing on, but we tried our best. All over Arnhem, you can find the Pegasus symbol, the divisional emblem of the British airborne, so the bridge was no exception. Next to the bridge was a little memorial remembering John Frost, the bridge’s namesake.

More memorials in Arnhem city center

The central Airborne Memorial on the Airborneplein

With our city map we had received in our hotel, we took a short walk to the next memorial. It consists of a bridge pillar of the old bridge and was erected on the 50th anniversary. Each year in September, Dutch, US, British and Polish flags are hoisted next to the pillar.

We then moved on to the Sint Walburg Basiliek (Saint Walburg Basilica). There is a stone relief memorial outside the church which depicts the destruction of the church and the city in 1944.

The church was empty, except from two older women who were sitting at a table and appeared to be selling brochures. We  took a look around and also visited the treasury of the church. There were also some historical pictures of the church in ruins.

When we returned to the outside, the rain had ceased and we moved on to the pedestrian zone with all the typical shops and stores we also know from German cities.

Arnhem night life

Giant Burgers

We were somewhat irritated by the fact that there weren’t any restaurants in the city (apart from very small fast food snack bars, serving the Dutch national dish: greasy Dutch fries). We were quite hungry, so we returned to the Hotel, took a shower, and then prepared for the Arnhem night life. The hotel website promised a “pulsating entertainment district in close vicinity to the hotel”, so we followed the groups of young people towards a main street next to the railway station and close to the pedestrian zone.

Drinking strange beers in Cafe Elsas

There we discovered why we hadn’t seen any restaurants before: Arnhem had a second pedestrian zone, entirely dedicated to eating and drinking and entertainment with bars, restaurants, and pubs. You could find all kinds of foods from all over the world, from US giant burgers, to Sushi, Greek, Italian, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, African, Turkish, or Arab cuisine. Since it had become quite warm and sunny (!), people were sitting outside all over the place in front of the restaurants and music was playing everywhere. There were so many restaurants that we couldn’t decide where to eat! In addition, we were quite irritated about the prices – even small dishes were quite expensive and a regular meal was very expensive, compared to Germany (which isn’t a cheap country, either!). We were interested in the “Nashville steak house” and an American restaurant offering giant burgers, so we decided to eat the giant burgers today and visit the steak house tomorrow.

More beer

We took a seat outside the burger restaurant and drank Dutch and Belgian beer (Belgium is famous for strange and exotic beers with various flavors and is closely behind Germany concerning beer variety). The announcement outside the restaurant was true, the burgers were really gigantic (and we only took the “small” ones, there was also “extra-large” available, but the waitress warned us that “extra-large” meant “extra-large”.)

After eating the burgers, we were quite thirsty and decided to explore the Dutch world of beers. We discovered a little bar named “Cafe Elsas” with a promising beer card, from Dutch to Belgian to French to Japanese beers… we took a seat outside in comfortable rattan chairs and started with strong Belgian monastery beers. The evening was very funny, the staff was helpful in recommending the next drinks, and the atmosphere was very relaxed.

Around midnight, we returned to the hotel. For the next day, we planned to visit two war museums and Oosterbek in the Arnhem outskirts.

Armhems Oorlogsmuseum 40-45

Arnhem War Museum 40-45

After a very rich breakfast buffet in the hotel, we gave up our precious parking space behind the hotel and drove to the Arnhems Oorlogsmuseum 40-45 (Arnhem War Museum 40-45)  in Arnhem-Schaarsbergen, located in the Arnhem outskirts in a former village school. It is a private museum which was opened in 1994. It contains a vast collection of material, ammunition, uniforms, documents, and weapons collected in Arnhem and the surrounding areas.

The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm. The entrance fee is 6 Euros.

The Oorlogsmuseum is maintained by very engaged volunteers and each visitor is accompanied by a personal guide. In our case, it was a young man who strived very hard to explain everything in German to us and to point out the most interesting exhibits and to tell the story behind them.

For more impressions, visit our Arnhem photo gallery!

Arnhem War Museum

Mines

German equipment

Ammunition

More finds from the battlefields

Miniature version of the Battle of Arnhem

You can walk through the exhibition on a circular path, including a second floor, and virtually each inch of the museum is stuffed with material from Operation Market Garden and from civil live during the war. From vehicles to weapons and ammunition, to a parachute, German, British, and Polish uniforms, equipment, up to soap and shaving cream, passports, photos, and little sceneries with mannequins dressed as soldiers – a very overwhelming experience!

We were the only Germans in the museum, most other visitors were from the Netherlands, UK, and USA. You can take pictures, but flashlight is forbidden. Fortunately, our guide was very relaxed in this regard, so we could take all the pictures we wanted.

Outside the museum, a large group of Dutch people were gathering on a clearing in the small forest behind the museum and we discovered that they were model makers reenacting the Battle of Arnhem with fully functional, remotely controlled tank models. They had built a miniature version of the area around the John Frost Bridge with terrain, roads, and small hills where they placed their tanks and moved them around, shooting their MGs and ordnance, some even with muzzle flashes and quite loud noise projectors.

Oosterbeek

Memorial in the Hartenstein park

After watching them for a while, we returned to our car and drove to Oosterbeek in the Arnhem perimeter. Oosterbeek is a beautiful little town, very well-kept, with tiny little houses within a large forest-like park with little rivers and lakes. We were quite enthusiastic about this pleasant place. The weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot, so we were really lucky.

The entire Oosterbeek area is full of Airborne memorials, information boards, and places of interest, so be prepared to spend an entire day or two here.

Airborne Museum Hartenstein

Airborne Museum Hotel Hartenstein, Oosterbeek

Our first stop was at the Airborne Museum Hartenstein, the number one Market Garden museum, located in Hotel Hartenstein, the former Allied HQ under the command of General Major R. E. Urquhart. Visiting this museum is a unique experience because it offers 1,700 square meters of exhibition space. In addition, you can visit the “Airborne experience”, a simulation area in the basement, where you can experience what it feels like to be right in the middle of the battle.

The Hotel is located in a very nice park with walking paths. Outside the Hotel, there are several tanks and guns as well as some more memorials.

At the Hartenstein Airborne Museum

The Hotel is beautifully renovated and the exhibition displays weapons, equipment, documents, photographs, and films. You can listen to authentic stories told by eyewitnesses – British, Polish, German soldiers and Dutch civilians. Everything is multi-lingual, and you can choose the language of the subtitles for the eyewitness reports.

The museum is open from April 1st to November 1st from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm (Sundays from 12:00). From November 1st to April 1st, it opens from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (Sundays from 12:00). The entrance fee is 8 Euros.

In contrast to the very cluttered Oorlogsmuseum, the Hartenstein Museum is very well-spaced. You visit the exhibition on a circular path, starting in the upper floors, and then moving down until you reach the cellar.

In the Hartenstein park

Listening to eyewitness reports

Paratrooper equipment and a paratrooper dummy

Some Arnhem games... they forgot Devil's Cauldron, though...

In the Hartenstein basement

After visiting the exhibition, the Airborne Experience awaits! Outside of the simulation area, there is a warning sign which informs visitors that the experience will be quite real, noisy, and authentic, so that traumatized or anxious people get the chance to skip this part of the museum and return to the Museum entrance via an alternate route.

Inside a glider

The Airborne Experience is in English, with Dutch subtitles. You are supposed to be a paratrooper. After a briefing (with original footage) in a kind of briefing room, you enter an original glider and then you walk through the destroyed city of Arnhem. There are projections at the walls, so that you get the impression that you are flying in the glider, or being approached by German tanks. It is very noisy, there are surprising moments when you enter the houses, doors banging, shouts, shots, and German or English voices. There are impressive light effects, and sometimes things are getting very chaotic in the dark streets of Arnhem close to a mortar emplacement or next to a road block – it’s much more impressive in real than in the movie above. All in all, we thought it to be a very cool and innovative idea.

We spent some time in the Museum shop where you can buy tons of Operation Market Garden memorabilia – cups, t-shirts, glasses, key rings, caps, jackets, postcards, books, DVDs, tank models – you name it, they have it. In addition, you can buy books and DVDs about other WWII battles. I usually cannot resist when I’m in a museum shop, so I bought an Airborne t-shirt and an Airborne mug.

Memorials in Oosterbeek

Oosterbeek

Afterwards, we went into the Hartenstein park where we visited the memorials and took a look at the tanks and guns outside. Then, we crossed the main street (which is the starting point of the annual Airborne March) and moved over to another little park with the largest Airborne Memorial. It is a column with four sides, on each of which is a relief depicting: the landing, the assistance of the women of Oosterbeek to the wounded, the collaboration of the underground forces to the Airborne divisions, the last heroic resistance. The top of the column is crowned by five figures and the the figure of liberty appears above the other figures. The other figures symbolize Belief, Justice, Home, Hope, and Love.

We then took a walk through Oosterbeek (you can also follow the “perimeter route” there, where informational boards tell you about the historical events in the area) and visited several more memorials which are hidden all over the town, in front yards, the little forests and parks.

Memorial in Oosterbeek

Again, we were very impressed of how well-maintained all memorials are. All memorials were decorated with fresh flowers, garlands, and the little wooden crosses with the red flower in the center (and sometimes with very personal notes) you can find on War memorials all over Western Europe (we also discovered them in the Huertgen Forest). We learned that the local school classes take care of the memorials and the graves on the Allied war cemetery, placing fresh flowers on each grave on a regular basis.

We spent some time in the Oosterbeek central forest (because we took a wrong turn and got lost ), before we returned to the car to search for the Oude Kerk (Old Church). The Oude Kerk was one of the last strongholds of the British 1st Airborne division and heavily damaged during the fightings. There are rumors that inside the church there are also some reminders to the role of the church during the Battle of Arnhem, but we didn’t manage to enter the church, because it was always closed when we got there. We tried again on the next day, but the church was still (or again) closed.

The central Airborne Memorial in Oosterbeek

Oosterbeek Memorial

Oosterbeek is a tiny little village, located inside a little park / forest

A signpost of the Perimeter Route

The Oude Kerk (Old Church) in Oosterbeek

Memorial outside the Oude Kerk

Outside the church is a monument dedicated to the soldiers who fought in and around the church. It contains the inscription: “In September 1944 British Airborne Soldiers and their Polish comrades with the support of brave Dutch men and women fought a grim battle around this ancient Church in the struggle to liberate The Netherlands from Nazi tyranny. This stone commemorates all who took part in this action and above all those who died. Not one shall be forgotten!”

Commonwealth War Cemetery Oosterbeek / Airborne Cemetery

Allied War Cemetery

Last but not least, we went to the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Oosterbeek. Unfortunately, we were still haunted by an annoying British school class we had met in the Hartenstein museum before, but we managed to reach the cemetery minutes before they got there by bus, so we got the chance to enjoy the quiet and solemn atmosphere of this place for a short while.

The war cemetery contains 1,680 graves of Allied soldiers who were killed during the September landings and fightings in the area. 245 soldiers are still unidentified. (The German soldiers are buried on the large war cemetery Ysselstijn, which is the only German war cemetery in the Netherlands. It contains the graves of 31,598 soldiers). Every year, a memorial service is held on the first Sunday after September 17.

Fresh flowers everywhere

What catches the eye on the Oosterbeek cemetery is the fact that each(!) grave is decorated with fresh flowers. We walked along the rows of graves and then sat down on a bench while the British pupils swarmed all over the place. Fortunately, they were almost quiet and much less annoying than in the Hartenstein museum. When they were gone, we took some photos and then left our greetings in the visitor’s book inside a small brick building.

After visiting the cemetery, we moved along a farm track to a large field where another memorial was located: The monument for the Air Dispatchers, in honor of the men who supplied the troops with food, ammunition and medicine. Since many drop zones were in German hands, the Air dispatchers risked their life by flying with their slow aircraft through Flak fire, trying to reach the Airborne troops. Many were shot down during this attempt.

Air Dispatcher Memorial, Oosterbeek

Arnhem night life, part II

Another evening in Cafe Elsas

We spent the entire day in Oosterbeek before returning to our hotel in central Arnhem. Our parking space behind the hotel was gone, of course, so we got into serious trouble of parking our car somewhere where we didn’t have to pay 2,50 Euros per hour. In addition, traffic in Arnhem is somewhat complex (in the eyes of an outsider) and while we were circling the city center, we made the mistake of missing an entrance to a public parking lot and were forced to cross the Rhine on another bridge which led us right into an industrial area and something which looked like a ghetto district. Fortunately, our satnav knew the way back across the Rhine and we reached a remote parking lot close to the city center. Since the instructions on the vending machine were in Dutch only, we decided that we were tourists and didn’t understand that we had to pay 2,50 per hour and risked getting a parking violation ticket.

After taking a shower in the hotel, we again moved to the Arnhem entertainment district where we went straight to the Nashville steak house. The beer was good, the steaks were great, this restaurant is highly recommendable (despite the shockingly high prices). Then, we went to Cafe Elsas again, where we had spent the evening before – but there will still beers on the card we hadn’t tasted yet. We sat down in the same Rattan chairs as the day before and continued drinking.

Around midnight, we returned to the hotel. The next day was my birthday, so at midnight Andreas prepared a mini-cake with a candle for me and gave me a birthday present. It was a very nice evening in a very relaxed and hospitable city.

Heelsum

Memorial at the Walburgakerk, Arnhem city

Airborne Memorial in Heelsum

On our last day, after another opulent breakfast, we checked out of our hotel and did another short walk through Arnhem city and the pedestrian shopping zone – which appeared to be closed on Monday mornings. This was entirely new to us and it felt strange to walk along ghostly, deserted shops and stores.

We made our second attempt to visit Eusebius church which is located at the Arnhem market place because we were very interested in the parachutist sculpture. According to our guidebook, the church was for the most part destroyed during the Battle of Arnhem. Several monuments in the church commemorate this. On the 50th anniversary of the Battle in 1994, a sculpture group at the ceiling of the church was unveiled, depicting 19 parachutists descending on the city of Arnhem; their parachutes are formed by the church’s ceiling. Unfortunately, the church was closed again, so we could only visit the sculpture “Man against Might” outside the church, symbolizing the sorrows of war.

When we returned to our car, we found out that nobody had discovered our parking violation (or bothered with giving a parking violation ticket to foreigners). We then drove to the small city of Heelsum to visit another famous Airborne Memorial.

Heelsum

Heelsum is located at the southern edge of the dropping area. The Heelsum memorial was the first memorial erected after WWII. It is made of several pieces of equipment, supply containers, and a British 6 pounder AT gun. Above the gun is the silhouette of a paratrooper. The text on the monument says: “On the 17th of sept. 1944 about 1 oclock in the afternoon the 1st airborne division landed on the heath around this point and began from here its grand operation.”

We took a short walk around the monument to enjoy the great weather and to say farewell to Arnhem before we drove home.

There is still so much to discover in and around Arnhem and we greatly enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere, the open-minded and friendly people, and the historical awareness of an entire region. We will certainly return to Arnhem and Oosterbeek for another visit, that’s for sure!

And don’t forget to visit our Arnhem photo gallery!

"Hey, you see that sign over there? HFC will be back soon!" - "Really? Cool!"

…just a quick note about the lack of activity that you may have noticed here on the HFC website for some time. Real life got a bit busy due to our jobs and because Denny decided to move her HQ closer to my area of operation which in fact means she’s moved to a lovely old house just 2 minutes away from my Rohan battle hall

That will give us even more opportunities to play our games together and we do have some great ones sitting on our shelf that will be tested and getting in depth reviews. Also we plan to expand our gaming to the whole wargame universe which means we’ll add tabletop to the hex ‘ counter consims, LCGs, board-/card based wargames and the rest we already play regularly. We are currently reading anything we can get about the huge Warhammer 40k universe and have already decided with which factions to begin our journey into this new area of our hobby, so prepare to read some AARs about fierce Space Wolves vs. Chaos Space Marines battles.

We are in the end phase of the renovation now and hope to get back to our old and new games (which we really miss to play…) and the usual support of our hobby with infos and stuff here asap. So stay tuned and expect the Homefront Wargame Center to move into gear again soon!

Thanks for visiting our website!

FFG continues to create and publish games on big licences…after Lord of the Rings – The Card Game they now announce a LCG on Star Wars! Great news for all you solitaire and coop gamers again – you will be part of the Rebel Forces and fight against the evil imperium, it’s for 1-4 players. Hard to tell anything about gameplay and whether it is similar to the LOTR LCG gameplay since we don’t know much about the game beyond the fact that it is in the making. Head over to the FFG site for the game and read yourself what we know so far.

As fans of the Gears of War videogames, I remember that a good while back we were really excited to see a small section over at FFG that said there was a GoW game in the making. We read that little news years ago and although it was still there in the deep dungeons of the FFG forum, nothing happened for years…

…but now we are even more excited than ever before. The game lives! It will be published by FFG and from what we can read in the official announcement, it could become truly epic and glorious. It will be designed as a COOP game, something we greatly appreciate and which perfectly fits the nature of the videogames and it seems the Locust (the enemy species in the GoW universe) are controlled by a good paper AI.

So Gears all over the world, prepare yourself to be ready when the great battle is fought not only on the screen with the final episode coming this year, but also on your… gaming table!

Check out the recent information about the game here!

And if you want more detailed info on everything Gears then check out Gearspedia!

Update:

The rules can be found here and there’s a FFG video now available about the game…

]]> http://wargamecenter.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/gears-of-war-the-boardgame/feed/ 0 Andreas Ludwig box-gears-of-war-left http://wargamecenter.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/ordensburg-vogelsang-a-field-trip/ http://wargamecenter.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/ordensburg-vogelsang-a-field-trip/#comments Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:16:22 +0000 Denny Koch http://wargamecenter.wordpress.com/?p=2605 ]]>

The eagles of the "Adlerplatz", Ordensburg Vogelsang

One sunny weekend in April, we decided to make a field trip to the NS Ordensburg (“Order Castle”) Vogelsang, located in the western Eifel region of Germany, close to the Ardennes, Huertgen Forest and the Belgian border.

Castle Vogelsang was built by the National Socialists in 1936 in order to serve as an elite educational center for future leaders. It is the second largest relic of National Socialist architecture after the Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg. After World War II, the castle served as Belgium barracks and NATO training area. It was handed back to Germany for civil use in 2006. Since then, it is open to the public and still under transformation into a documentary center.

Location

An old photograph of Burg Vogelsang

Ordensburg Vogelsang is located near the small town of Gmünd in the district of Schleiden, high above the Urft dam in the National Park Eifel. The area of the landmarked buildings is 50,000 square metres, but only 20% of what was planned was eventually finished before the outbreak of World War II, which marked the end of the educational program.

Some minor parts of the castle were destroyed in WWII, but large parts of the castle survived the bombardments (which were mainly directed against the nearby Urft and Schwammenauel dams). The Ordensburg was hastily erected within two years by 1,500 workers. It looks ancient and rustic because the buildings appears to be made of quarry stones from the region, but in fact the buildings were made of concrete and steel frames which were  only hidden under the seemingly massive stones.

The place for the roll-call

Since the educational center was meant to resemble an Order Castle of the Deutscher Orden (Order of the Teutonic Knights), it needed a high tower which actually was a water tower (it never worked as planned, so it wasn’t used). In addition, there are several other buildings, for example community houses, a Thing place, a stadium, a gym, swimming pool, comradeship houses, a place for roll call etc..

Monuments showing the “ideal human” (who was meant to be educated here) can be found all over the place.

The main building next to the tower was destroyed in WWII and rebuilt in the original style later. Today, it contains the National Park Eifel tourist information, an educational center, a museum shop, and a small exhibition.

There is no entrance fee to visit the Ordensburg, but it is highly recommended that you participate in a guided tour which costs moderate 5 Euros. The tour guides are highly motivated honorary volunteers who lead you around the area in small groups of 15 people. A guided tour takes between 90 minutes and 2 hours. You can also climb up the tower which is 48 meters (157 feet) high, which costs 3 Euro and is also accompanied by a guide.

If you want to explore the area on your own, you can follow one of the three round tours which are very well signposted with information boards in German, English, Dutch, and French.

The distant ghost town Wollseifen

Close to the Ordensburg is the ghost town of Wollseifen. After WWII, the British forced the population to leave the town because they wanted to use it as a training area for city fights. Over the years, the original city was destroyed and fake buildings were erected. The training ground was later used by NATO forces, preparing for missions in former Yugoslavia, and by the Red Cross and other organizations.

Today, you can visit the deserted fake town (you have to walk there by foot and you are not allowed to leave the marked path when you go there), but it is planned to tear most of the buildings down and leave only the church (which is still the original one, minus the roof which was destroyed and replaced), which should then contain a documentary center about the buildings and life in the old village Wollseifen.

History

Junkers at the roll-call place

In 1933, Adolf Hitler declared that he planned to erect educational camps in order to educate new leaders. He was in desperate need of loyal people with leading qualities who should replace the old cadres who often had a different political opinion. Hastily, three educational camps were built: Ordensburg Vogelsang in the Eifel region, Crössinsee in Pomerania, and Sonthofen in the Allgäu Alps. These locations were chosen with care because they are all located within impressive and beautiful German landscapes – which should help to convince the leadership candidates of the beauty of their German homeland – and the need to expanse it.

Vogelsang was built on a hill above the very popular Urft reservoir which was a local recreation area with hotels and boats. It was also planned to build a gigantic “Kraft durch Freude (KdF) hotel” (“Strength through joy”) by the state-controlled leisure organization of the German Labour Front. The hotel was never built, though. Vogelsang was financed by the confiscated capital of the abolished labor unions and employer’s organizations.

The educational centers were soon dubbed “NS-Ordensburgen” (Order Castles) to emphasize the historical connection with the Teutonic Knights and their crusades into Eastern Europe. Vogelsang was planned by the Cologne architect Clemens Klotz who had also built the colossal KdF building in Prora on the island of Rügen, which is a 4,5 km (=2,8 miles) long concrete building along the coast line.

The panorama view from the tower is magnificent

Within two years, the main parts of Vogelsang were finished and education could begin. More buildings, for example a gigantic “House of Knowledge” or a sports stadium which was even larger than the Olympia Stadium in Berlin were planned, but never finished. Construction was halted with the outbreak of WWII.

View from the tower

In April 1936, Vogelsang was officially handed over to Adolf Hitler. The first 500 hand-picked “Junkers” moved into Vogelsang. They were personally chosen by Reichsorganisationsleiter of the NSDAP, Robert Ley.

The term “Junker” was also derived from old German feudal traditions, where they described members of the nobility. Junkers were not chosen upon their background, family, education, or job. On the contrary, the backgrounds of each candidate were never a subject to discussion and certificates were ignored. Other qualities were of greater importance: arian appearance, perfect physical health, proof of arian descent, proof of military service, engagement for the community, and they had to be married. Most were in their mid-twenties and some were even overtaxed by the intellectual indoctrination program, so the major focus in Vogelsang was shifted to sports and physical activities. Education mainly composed of the topics race science and geopolitics as well as good manners.

Adlerplatz without Adler (=eagles)

Because of the harsh regiment and drill, many Junkers quit and searched for easier ways to make money and a career. Payment also wasn’t very high; while their families were adequately supplied, they only got a few Reichsmark per day, just enough to buy a beer at the local tavern. 80% of the graduates later died in the war at the various fronts because they fanatically volunteered for the Wehrmacht, despite the fact that they were offered higher positions in the government. Some, of course, became administrators of occupied regions where they often were strongly involved into war crimes.

Despite the fact that the Junkers were supposed to become “the elite” who should later occupy key positions within the Reich, their accommodations were far from being luxurious. On the contrary, they lived and slept in so-called “Hundertschafthäusern” (“houses of the one hundred”) where they slept in large dormitories with about 50 men, side to side. The only other furniture besides rows of beds were lockers.

The day began early at 6.00 AM with morning exercises. 7.00 AM mustering at the roll-call place, followed by lectures, classes, and group work. After lunch, afternoon sports exercises. 5 PM-6.30 PM: more lectures and group work. 10 PM: rest.

The Thing place where ceremonies and festivities were held

Because of the isolated location deep in the Eifel region, the Junkers didn’t have much opportunity to spend their spare leisure time outside the castle walls. Instead, they were sent to various events, celebrations, and Nazi stagings all over Germany as “audience” in order to provide for a large, cheering crowd. The Ordensburg maintained a large motor pool just for moving Junkers around from one event to the next, even to the Reichsparteitag (Nürnberg Rallys) to ensure that there were always loyal, cheering masses in the public who would inspire other visitors and common people.

With the beginning of WWII, the junker program was halted and the castle was handed over to the Wehrmacht which used it as a staging area for large-scale operations, for example the Ardennes offensive in 1944 and the Western campaign in 1940, and as a field hospital.

At the end of WWII, the castle fell into British hands, who soon handed it over to the Belgium military authorities. The Belgians erected the Van Dooren barracks (named after the first Belgium casuality in WWII), and the castle was used as a training ground for NATO troops. NS symbols like swastikas were removed and many monuments were damaged (mainly by using them for target practice), but the buildings remained unharmed. The new barracks were even built-in the original architectural style. Some monuments remained intact, especially a large relief in the swimming bath, and some “torch bearers”.

In 2006, the castle was handed over to the German Government and was opened for the public. Today, a non-profit association is tasked with researching and documenting the history of the castle as well as making new plans for the future. A youth hostel is currently under construction, as well as a “Center for the Youth & Europe” where young people from all over Europe come together for common projects about nature and NS history.

Visiting Vogelsang

All information is available in German, English, Dutch, and French

We went to Vogelsang by car (you can also reach it with public transport, but the castle is located deep in the Eifel, so getting there is somewhat adventurous). If you take a route trough the Eifel hills and forests and small villages, you will get a good impression of the difficult terrain the Allied forces faced in the Ardennes and Huertgen forest.

Vogelsang has a large parking lot. From there, you have a good view across a valley to the ghost town of Wollseifen. From the parking lot, you have to walk about 500 meters (0.3 miles) to the main castle with the tourist information, some restaurants, museum shop, and exhibition.

Guided tours take place daily at 2 pm and you have to buy your ticket at the information. You are then assigned to one of the several tour guides. Vogelsang is highly frequented by tourists from all over Germany, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, or France. The castle is visited by about 200,000 visitors per year, most of them on spring and summer weekends.

We arrived at 1 pm, so we had one hour left until the guided tour. We went to the roll-call place and enjoyed the magnificent view over the Eifel hills, the Urft reservoir and dam and visited a small exhibition about “Organized vacations in the Third Reich”. The exhibition was interesting, it showcased many original KdF posters and explained the Third Reich philosophy of sending workers and people of all classes on recreational trips, sponsored by the Labor Movement and full of “community-building” activities (in other words: propaganda).

High above the Urft reservoir

Besides information about Ordensburg Vogelsang, the tourist forum also informs about the Nationalpark Eifel which is an important wildlife sanctuary and also interesting because of the geological past (the Eifel is a vulcanic region) and historical locations (military locations like the Westwall, but also ancient Roman and Medieval sites).

At 2 PM, we met with our tour guide. With a group of 15 people, we were then led through the vast castle area. The tour was very interesting, the tour guide was a local who lives in a nearby village. His mother had been a child when Vogelsang was still a Ordensburg and he remembered interesting stories about how the local children had to line up along the road to the castle when Hitler came for a visit.

He also took some large images with him where he showed us how a certain place, monument or building had looked when the castle was still in use. Amazingly, today most of the buildings still look like they did then. Only some of the monuments are severely damaged, for example the sportsmen monument. It was interesting to see how it had originally looked like before the Belgians used it for target practice, especially by shooting at the faces and genitals of the statues.

Taking a guided tour is a must

The guide allowed us to enter one of the houses where the Junkers slept in groups of 50. The beds and lockers had been removed, of course, because the buildings were used by the Belgians and others over the last 60 years. You could still see how hastily the castle was erected and it was quite disillusioning to see the concrete walls within the seemingly ancient and massive “quarry stone” buildings.

You are not allowed to enter the other buildings (besides the main building) on your own and they are usually locked, so if you want to see one from the inside, you have to participate in a guided tour.

Our guide then explained the Thingplatz to us where festivities were held on Summer Solstice or Hitler’s birthday. This place was built along the slope from the castle down to the Urft reservoir in a somewhat amphitheater-like style. Participants sat on over-sized stairs while fires were lit all along the slope and on giant statues like the torch-bearer (which must have been a quite impressive sight, but Nazis were famous for staging impressive events).

We learned a lot about life and education in Vogelsang and the guide was very engaged and open to questions without moralizing or displaying the common “I would not have joined in, I would have been in the resistance since day 1″ attitude you often meet in German historical sites dealing with National Socialism. On the contrary, he compared Nazi Germany and the propaganda and brainwashing machine to today’s North Korea and pointed out the similarities between the marching masses in both countries. Since you were manipulated 24 hours a day while being offered work, a simple solution for all your problems, and adventure, fun and comradeship in the Nazi youth organizations, he didn’t reject the possibility that he would have been attracted to the Hitler youth as a teenager or to becoming a Junker where you were constantly told that you were the elite and the best of the best, meant to rule the Reich. This was a very interesting and quite uncommon point of view, and we were really surprised about his open words.

In the end, the tour took almost 2 hours.

A "Hundertschafthaus" from the outside...

Inside the Hundertschaftshaus where 50 Junker slept

The tower as seen from the Thing place

The Thing place

Over-sized stairs

The tower

After the tour we decided to climb the tower. You are not allowed to climb the tower on your own, the spiral staircase is very tight and you need to be free from vertigo or claustrophobia if you want to climb up the 172 stairs. Only 15 people are allowed in the tower at a time, but we were only 3, so we had another guide (this time a trainee girl) almost for our own.

The view from the tower was great, you could see all over the Urft reservoir and dam, over the castle area, and up to several Eifel towns with their wind power turbines, and last but not least, the ghost town of Wollseifen. The guide showed us the most remarkable landmarks and explained them to us, and afterwards we could enjoy the view for a few more minutes. Climbing the tower and enjoying the view took about half an hour. There are many castle buildings spread all over the hill, and it’s hard to imagine that they only comprise about 20% of what was originally planned. If the Nazis had had enough time to finish their plans, the size of the entire complex would have been beyond imagination.

The "Fackelträger" (torch-bearer)

We also visited the “Fackelträger” (Torch bearer) monument, which in fact was a giant torch. During ceremonies, the basin on top of the monument was filled with oil and then ignited, so that the entire statue was lit by a giant flame which could be seen even at the Urft dam.

The swimming bath is open to the public and used by the locals from the nearby villages. Amazingly, the relief of three “ideal” humans is still intact and can be seen through a small window, if you don’t want to swim. We went across the Thingplatz, visited the damaged sportsmen, and finally moved back to the Adler place. This huge place was named after the two eagle statues which had been there, but today, the damaged eagles are removed from their podiums and placed next to a wall.

The weather was great, sunny without a single cloud with a fresh wind and modest 20 C (68F) and since it was early April, the location wasn’t too crowded with tourists either. If you are in the Eifel or Ardennes region or visiting Belgium or the Netherlands, you should visit this interesting location – it is well worth a visit!

The size of the Fackelträger compared to a human...

The swimming bath relief is still intact

...while the sportsmen relief was used for target practice

The original sportsmen

If you are interested, visit the official Ordensburg website at: www.vogelsang-ip.de. Information is available in German, English, Dutch, and French. You can get there by car or by train (there is a National Park bus shuttle service from Kall railway station, only on weekends). As mentioned above, there is no entrance fee. The area is open from 8 AM – 8 PM, the forum and restaurants are open from 10 AM – 5 PM.

Visit our image gallery for more photos!

"Operation Red Nose" - 4 days of eating, drinking, and non-stop gaming!

This years’ HFC & Friends Game Meeting was again held around the days that are known in Germany as ‘Karneval’ or ‘Fasnacht’ and which is a time when folks start wearing silly costumes, drinking a lot and dancing to a very weird form of music

Since we don’t belong to those who take part in such strange rites, we usually use the time to prepare ourselves with beer, food, and games and then just close the door for a few days of gaming. A good friend of ours, Wolfgang,  who is living in Mainz (also a city which is ruled by the ‘fools’ during this time) then comes over to join us and so he arrived on Friday, quite early. Denny and I got some new cool games over the year which he didn’t know yet, and we were also eager to get some multiplayer games going with games we could only play with two players so far, so we were looking forward to some great game sessions.

When Wolfgang arrived, we started with a little chitchat and had a beer for starters and then we prepared the gaming table. He was very interested in trying out some LCGs about which we talked before and he had some first impressions about the core gameplay of these sort of card games when he played Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers on the Xbox 360 (it’s not a LCG, but not actually a CCG either, so it’s a game in-between with pre-built decks and limited possibilities to customize your deck). But he at least knew the basic gameplay and he liked it, so he was interested to see how a real LCG would be played face to face.

Call of Cthulhu (LCG)

The first game: Call of Cthulhu (LCG)

The first game on the table was Call of Cthulhu (FFG), which is the easiest of the three LCGs published by FFG so far. Since we all love Arkham Horror and the Lovecraft theme, this game seemed to be a good introduction to the LCG genre. We set it up, I explained the basic Sequence of Play and then we started playing right away, using the player aid sheet that we had printed out and laminated before, to make things as easy as possible.

Wolfgang chose the Miskatonic University deck and I played a Shub-Niggurath deck, all of which were mono decks. By now, we own enough Asylum Packs to play all factions of the game as mono decks, and although for some players out there this doesn’t seem to be the best way to play the game competitively, we decided to use mono for Wolfgang’s introductory games for several reasons. First, it’s easier for a new player to see how a faction in a pure format is played, how it feels, and he will soon realize the strengths and the weak points of that faction. To know the specific strengths and weaknesses of a given faction is an important prerequisite for deck customization.To give Wolfgang a very harsh and brutal impression of each fashion, we even removed the neutral cards from all decks, so that he could feel the raw characteristics of each faction without any fine tuning and balancing. The intention was to show him the options for deckbuilding and deck enhancements by chosing a certain focus, adding neutral cards, or even by building a combi deck with a second faction, which will eventually lead to a deck that works great. If you don’t know the characteristics of a certain faction, you don’t really know how to counter their weaknesses or how to maximize their strong aspects.

CoC gaming table

Apart from this, we generally don’t mix all factions wildly together because we love to play the game based more on theme than on raw competition power, so Denny and I also chose our decks based on the humans vs cultists dichotomy that is part of the Lovecraft stories. Denny is playing all cultist/Old Ones factions while I am playing the Syndicate, Miskatonic University and the Agency. In our games, we pimp these factions with neutral cards but seldom mix them with the other factions, it just feels right for us to actually play from a certain story perspective.

The first game indeed showed that the Miskatonic University (with all their professors and students, who are well-educated and learned in old scriptures dealing with arcane content) is a difficult faction to play without any neutral cards. The MU is quite strong in the arcane and investigation struggles, but really weak in terror and combat. That means if you are sending out some of these academics to investigate what’s happening, they might have the knowledge to solve the arcane and investigation struggles but they are easily frightened by anything supernatural. So before they can use their strengths to get some success tokens on a story, they often will flee the scene because of a lost terror struggle or be dead and out of the game after an attack by the monsters lurking around.

Shubb-Niggurath vs. Miskatonic University

Shub-Niggurath, on the other hand, is quite strong in terror and combat, but lacks on the investigation side, so usually this deck doesn’t score a point in the investigation struggle, even if no one is around to stand against them. Therefore, bringing success tokens on the story is taking some time and the fastest way to achieve this is by eliminating the opponent’s characters with terror and combat, so at least you get the additional success token for being unchallenged in a story. The match MU vs. SN seemed to be a bad choice at first and very unbalanced as the first game was a complete domination of my Shub-Nigurrath faction over the MU, who never really got thru because of losing the first two struggles (terror and combat). Afterwards, we decided to play a second game with the same factions nonetheless, because Wolfgang didn’t want to base his judgement about this particular faction on his first game alone, so now feeling a bit more competent and knowing what the MU faction can do – and what not, we shuffled the cards and started again.

This time – and that’s the beauty of the game, really – things went completely different and not really well for me. I wasn’t able to bring out characters in the first turns at all and in later turns only some weak ones while Wolfgang had some great guys on the table, who were able to limit my actions and could control the game by their various character abilities. He hit me fast and hard with some spells, which limited me even further and he actually rushed me and won quite easily this time. Since I couldn’t send out some of my better characters to challenge him, he had not to deal with the terror and combat struggles as much as in our first game. Some of his abilities changed all terror or combat struggles into ones that could only be won with investigation icons and since that’s not the strength of Shub-Niggurath, I usually lost these as well as the genuine investigation struggles. So the second game ended with an easy victory for the MU and it was a good example how even such an unbalanced combination of factions in a game can be won by the faction that is considered the weaker one if things go right for them.

Still, the MU usually has a hard time alone and makes for a much better support faction in a combi deck, so a strong partner who can deal with terror and combat is able to cover their backs, while they can use their arcane and investigation icons to keep standing after being involved in a story and collect success tokens on a regular base.

Generally, Wolfgang liked the game and stated “that it demonstrates very well the strong aspect of LCGs -  very simple game mechanics, but still lots of tactical/strategic options and the possibility to play it according to your very own ideas with the customization of the decks”. This ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ nature of the game appealed to him and so he said: “Let’s try out another LCG!”.

Warhammer Invasion (LCG)

The next game: Warhammer Invasion (LCG)

So we prepared the gaming table for the next LCG, one step up in complexity and options (complexity is a relative term here, of course, because compared with a consim, all LCGs are quite simple) and that was Warhammer: Invasion.

Warhammer: Invasion is based on the Warhammer Fantasy universe, a different universe than the known Warhammer 40k universe, and we only own the core set so far. Thus, when using only the core set, you simply choose your faction from the pre-built decks in the box, spice up this basic deck with 10 random neutral cards and you are ready to go. Wolfgang stuck to a human faction as he did in the previous game, so he chose the Empire. As in CoC, Denny and I had divided the factions among us – she’s playing the Orcs, the Chaos etc. and I’m going into battle with the Dwarfs and the Empire. I didn’t have any problems with Wolfgang’s choice because this would allow me to play a faction which was completely new to me as well. I wanted to try out the Chaos, so after choosing sides and dealing out the neutral cards, we laid out the citadels and the war-horns were blowing…

The Chaos was crushed by the Empire

Using our player aid sheets and the rulebook, we got into the game easily and it didn’t take long before we were engaged with each other, thinking about our possibilities. I had some form of deja vu however, because I couldn’t really bring out many characters. What I had on my hand was expensive and so I had some troubles to defend my citadel while lacking the force to really attack his one. The game went on with some discussions about the rules and the card wordings, which is still a general problem of this whole genre. You are easily disappointed when you come to the game with a consim mind, expecting some clear and extensive rules about all details of the game. One has to adapt to a very literal understanding of the cards’ wording to not get into trouble about how some cards are used and especially when to use them.

In the mid game, I was able to bring out better characters and at least could stand against the fast Empire deck for some time, but in the end I lost. Apparently, you have to get used to the abilities and characters of the Chaos faction if you want to be successful, so we decided to shuffle the decks and used the same cards for a rematch.

This time I had some great cards in my starting hand and was able to bring out some good characters and cards that created corruption to the enemy, while my characters could gain strength thru their corruption! I had some nice little synergies in effect and prepared for some major attack… when the Empire cleared the battlefield with a card that killed all characters in play who were not in a zone with a developement! I didn’t have any developments in play because I planned to use my cards offensively and Wolfgang had only a few characters out and one developement which saved a good character.

As scary as the dark forces of Chaos: The cake, forged by orcs in the depths of Mordor, made of blood and steel

So I saw myself totally open to the enemy with all my good cards and my smart little synergy plan destroyed in one single sweep. Things went bad again for my Chaos faction from then on, I didn’t get any good cards anymore or at least not cards I could afford with my now limited resources and from my citadel I could watch Wolfgang preparing for battle with more and more troops. In the end he had out a dozen cards both for the attack and the defense while I could barely bring out a little demon then and now before everything was killed again and so that game ended also with a glorious victory of the Empire over the Chaos.

This game was even more appealing to him because of the nice touch of options you get with the three zones in play, but the cards and rules questions that came up were a bit disappointing for him. The problem is not so much the fact that a game which uses many different cards and effects and time frames to play cards and defend against cards, has some ambiguous aspects in the wordings of rules and card texts, but the unsatisfying situation that there’s not really any answer to get by the designer(s). When you look for some answers that might help you to clarify specific points, you usually only have the official FAQ and the forum over at FFG or BGG.

Enjoying famous mincemeat garlic balls, pasta salad, turkish bread with home-made garlic butter, and of course German beer

The FAQ is good to have, but you are completely dependent on when the designers will bring it out, when they decide to update it and especially which questions will be answered and which problems they will address in the end. Everything not answered is open to debate by the players and that’s what players do – they discuss rule and card problems and try to find a reasonable solution. That’s fine and all and helps you to get on with your game, but no matter how good the solution looks, it’s still a house rule as long as there’s no answer by the designers. As a wargamer I very much appreciate the close contact to designers over at CSW or even via email, so often you get a fast reply by the person who did design the game in question and you therefore know that’s what the designer had in mind when he wrote the rules. FFG seldom does that directly in a forum and that is a weak point in their support for their games. Still, the LCGs are playable and it’s certainly not a game breaker, or better has not been so far for us (there’s the danger though, that things might come up that no one can decide upon and the game session would be over if no one can agree on a solution), so we enjoyed the game anyway.

After that we had a break for some food and beer and talked a bit about different games and such and  I showed him the new game by DVG Hornet Leader Carrier Operations, which unfortunately didn’t really interest him. For some reason he has some problems with playing modern warfare games, although he’s playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on the Xbox 360, which is not really WWI either, so when we talked about it and the question on ‘moral’ regarding wargames and certain eras came up, it didn’t really convince me. Surely, there are folks out there who refuse to play modern stuff or even a certain side in a WWII wargame, but to say the truth, I don’t understand that. Anyway, the opportunity to try out this great game in a coop session with him was lost because of his non-interest in the topic and so we called it a day.

A Game of Thrones (LCG)

First Multiplayer game: A Game of Thrones (LCG)

The next morning, on Saturday, Denny arrived for breakfast and brought along the important pizza supply and after hot coffee, toast, tea and eggs and more to strengthen us, we again prepared the gaming table.

We set up the third LCG we own, A Game of Thrones, and for the first time had the opportunity to try it out with three players. The multiplayer map that is included in the box is only used – as the name suggests – when you play with more than two players (in fact the game is indeed a multiplayer game that can also be played with only 2 players and not the other way round as is the case with the other LCGs) and it adds some interesting choices to make. Players play a certain role now in the political conflict that is going on in Westeros to win the Iron Throne and so you can be Hand of the King, Master of Coins, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard etc. which is a certain position supporting other titles, opposing another one at the same time by being supported by a third. There are limitations to observe when you choose a certain title because you can’t attack the title you support, while the supported one can attack you. You get more power (points) by defeating a title that is opposing you, while your supporter can make things easier for you and help you out when you are attacked without being able to defend yourself properly. All in all, a very interesting twist to the general gameplay and adding a whole new dimension of choices.

Playing the three-player melee variant

We also have more than enough cards to have several houses to choose from, i.e. House Stark, House Martell, House Lannister, House Baratheon and House Targaryan (House Greyjoy is not playable yet, we need some boosters to get it going and I also want to create a Nights Watch deck, for which I currently collect the cards – so still potential left here). We pre-built decks for all our houses, so we could all choose a deck and start right away.

Wolfgang doesn’t know the books the game is based on and so he  actually has no knowledge about the story, the characters and so on and for some reason he doesn’t like the artwork (in his opinion, everybody in the game is portrayed in a rather ugly way, with twisted faces – which actually is nothing I could agree upon, but that’s how he felt about it), so for him the different houses were all the same from the start and he randomly chose House Martell. I had built a new House Stark deck and wanted to try it out (heavy focus on direwolves to send out against my foes) while Denny used her favorite choice – House Lannister (‘Lannister to the bone’ she is )

All was set up and Denny explained everything, which was quite easy to follow for him now because of the basic knowledge he had from the previous games. After we checked out how to play the multiplayer game, we were ready to start.

Martell vs. Lannister vs. Stark

The first game was dominated by House Lannister, Denny had lots of money to support her nasty cards and effects and neither House Martell nor House Stark could really do anything about it. Lannister accumulated power point after power point and while House Martell at least could stay in the game, House Stark was not really part of anything that happened on the gaming table. My great plan to send out my wolves as soon as possible and then to use characters that would gain strength from the wolves in play didn’t really work out since… there were no wolves around. My hand always had different characters that didn’t support what I wanted to try out and when I changed my plan to get back into the action and finally had some strong cards in front of me, some cruel game effect caused by House Martell took them all out at once. So my strength – military challenges – couldn’t be used anymore and in the next turns I constantly lost cards because of intrigue challenges and I lost what power I gained so far due to power challenges to both – House Lannister and House Martell. The game ended with a clear Lannister victory and a quite puzzled Lord Eddard Stark… still waiting for the wolves to arrive.

Again, it was the first game and we shuffled the cards anew for the next game. This time Wolfgang was confident because the first game had clearly showed him what House Martell should use as a tactic and what to avoid, and House Lannister had no reason to lose any confidence because of the easy win in the last game. House Stark realized, though, that the time for revenge had come, since the ‘lost wolves’ were gathering in huge numbers in my hand…

From that on, I was able to play what I intended to play with the new deck and I could bring out strong cards which were able to hit fast and hard, to use stealth and the threat of “deadly” characters to hold my foes at bay. This time my weak points – lack of intrigue and power icons – were not that obvious because I had some interesting characters like Hodor with an attachment that gave him an intrigue icon, too. All in all, the first turns went quite well for the Starks and I could prepare myself in a rather fortified position that was easily defended against all military challenges and a good deal of intrigue and power challenges as well.  House Lannister and House Martell realized that this time, my Stark deck would be no pushover as it was in the last game and they decided to go against each other instead of attacking me while trying to defend themselves against my military attacks. That of course made me even stronger because I could make strong military attacks to eliminate characters from both Houses, and often could win power this way by making unopposed challenges. House Lannister lost more and more characters while House Martell could defend better with some really powerful cards, but in the end, House Stark won back all the lost glory of the first game. I was quite satisfied with my new deck and now have a better base to optimize it even more.

Wolfgang The Red Viper (left) vs. Eddard Andy Stark (right)

The third and final game went much better for House Martell and although Stark was ahead in the mid game (while House Lannister again had serious troubles), Martell in the end game came back strong and won a great victory by using many characters that were able to collect power with their renown ability. Proper defending by these characters left not much possibilities to get these power points back from Martell, because the power on their characters was in no easy reach for either Lannister nor Stark, so that was a close game which showed how flexible the gameplay in AGoT LCG actually is.

We then discussed the games of the day and agreed that this game is the best of all the three LCGs available at the moment. The many different options the players have and the many layers of gameplay, such as the plot decks which the game offers together with the more open approach in the challenges in general, makes this one a real great and quite deep game. Of course, the experience is even deeper if you know the books by G.R.R. Martin, so you can recognize the characters you like (or those you dislike), and it’s really cool that you can actually take part in that great story about the Iron Throne. The multiplayer adds much to an already satisfying game and is certainly the best way to play it, because you have to take into consideration all the  connections between the players that shift from turn to turn. Initiative is even more important in a multiplayer game because now you have the opportunity to choose a title before the other players do, which often is worth playing a high initiative plot card.

All in all, a fantastic game and easy to teach to a new gamer.

Lighting: War on Terror

Lightning: War on Terror

After cleaning up the table and some gaming talk while having a beer and eating pizza we had some time left before going to sleep and so we tried out a game that Denny brought with her. We already own Lightning: D-Day from the Lightning Series by DG/DVG and the new game we opened that evening was Lightning: War on Terror.

We expected a game on the lines and with the mechanics of the other Lightning games, but we were actually surprised that it is a completely different game which has nothing to do with the other games of the series. The only thing that is comparable is: it’s using cards and it’s a light game…

Fighting terrorist threats all over the world

It’s a multiplayer game, can be played with 2 – 4 players and deals with modern warfare where the US is trying to liberate states like Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen etc. Set up was easy and quick, the game was learned in minutes and after we were a bit confused about the mechanics and how the game played… we came to the conclusion that it was fun to play! And, surprisingly enough, Wolfgang suddenly had no objection to playing a game on modern warfare…

It reminded us of a military-style Quartets game and there’s some strategy and fun in there, although it’s definitely more fun with more than 2 people! Playing time is really short (less than half an hour), but it isn’t a game you won’t repeatedly play for hours and hours and hours. It’s a great little game, however, while having a beer, as a closer or filler, as we used it on that saturday after many hours of concentration and gaming and for that it worked perfectly.

I won’t go into details here because we are planning to write a HFC review about it anyway, so stay tuned

Space Hulk – Death Angel

Space Hulk: Death Angel, a great cooperative experience

Now, THAT's a swarm... led by a Brood Lord

Sunday started with breakfast and then we soon switched to another game, Space Hulk – Death Angel, which is one of our favorites, because it’s a great coop game (as you can read in our extensive review). Set up was easy and fast and then we used the step by step description in the rulebook to get (back) into the game and explain it to our friend. In the three player game, we used a different starting location than we had used before in our 2 player sessions and therefore we had much more Space Marines in play as well.

All three players command two teams consisting of 2 Marines each, so the entire formation contains 12 Space Marines – which is quite an impressive sight on the table. We used a form of in-character play, so that you don’t give away all the information on your action cards right away, but try to explain what you want to do in more realistic terms, just hinting how fast you would be able to execute the order you will give your marines, so there’s still the ‘factor X’ that you may come too late to the show with a high numbered action card…

Our first game went well rules-wise, but it clearly showed our friend what to expect and that it was no easy win against the genestealers – our Marines were slain! This convinced him of the most important aspect of player communication if you want to have at least a slight chance against the Aliens – who often seem to have intelligence on their own in this great little game. Although the gamebox is quite small, once you lay out the cards you’ll see that the game actually needs a big gaming table. We discussed our options, supported each other, slew the genestealers, lost or even sacrificed men in fight, had some desperate  ‘Oh no! Not him!’ situations but also cool events when some ‘Strike! Yes, I got them!’ cheers went up and all in all we had a really great time with the game. Although the genestealers had the better time because they eventually defeated us in the last room…

Discussing strategies is a crucial aspect of the game

…which was nothing we could accept of course, we had our orders by the Imperium and after shuffling everything again and dealing out new team combinations, a new formation was sent into the Space Hulk.

This time everything went really well, we made the right decisions at the right time, we had lots of support tokens on our characters, we got thru the locations quickly and safely while killing every ugly alien face that looked thru the ventilation duct or waited around the next corner. Again we came to the last location and thought we were in a good position this time… before everything first turned to bad, then to worse. The genestealers came in in great numbers, two brood lords showed up that we had to kill in order to win the game and which are stronger than the normal Alien. Brood Lords also try to hide behind other genestealers and you have to kill all those in a swarm with a brood lord before you can bring down the final boss. The Aliens started to flank us and sometimes a Space Marine had 15 genestealers behind his back and everybody was – of course – facing the wrong direction and so not able to cover his back.

Tough decision: which Marine should be sacrificed to safe the others?

We were so close to victory that we actually felt sorry for our Marines when things started to go wrong big style… our chances began to worsen from turn to turn, as more and more Aliens showed up and moved around the formation, while we desperately tried to cover each others’ backs. Then the first KIA happened and the formation shifted together to fill in the gaps left by the dead brothers, sometimes some Marines used their psychic abilities to freeze a big swarm and others forced them into another direction now and then, just to get some breathing space and the opportunity to reload (support token) and to turn around before the next attack came in… another brother down… what to do? Give up? We can not win… NO! We cannot win, but these are Space Marines, they will NOT give up… what can YOU do this round? Support and Move… fine… and you? Support yes… ok then, support me, I’ll shoot that swarm and try to thin them out, we must get to the Brood Lord! Ok, then we know what to do… switch the cards. Another roll with the combat die, genestealers go down screaming, the Brood Lord is one step nearer… weapon jammed, no skull on the die, no kill. Now’s the genestealers’ turn, they attack, our brother goes down… move!!! back to back… what now? What options are left for us? Hm… let’s see, what if we…. yes, let’s try that out…

Facing death in the final room of the Space Hulk...

We had a great game and it ended in an epic way with the formation losing man after man while all were surrounded by genestealers. We were able to kill one of the Brood Lords, which alone was worth the long game since it first didn’t look like we had any chances left in the final location. The last standing brother knew he would go down facing a large swarm in front of him, a team-mate just killed beside him in the attack before, but he had some bullets left given to him by the now dead brothers… and he used them to go down fighting – he was a Space Marine!

That game appealed to everybody and Wolfgang appreciated the fact that the players actually had some chances to win even in that last room despite the seemingly desperate situation. When the Space Marine who was using his “counterattack” ability would have rolled skulls on the die, he could have killed a genestealer with every skull and get going with the fight as long as skulls were rolled. If things go nicely, then such a counterattack can eliminate a swarm with 17 genestealers, not likely, but possible.

The cards look great, the options are enough to make for a thinking game and the atmosphere is true to the Warhammer canon. Highly recommended!

Circus Minimus

It was already late, but after dinner, we decided to at least start a chariot race and brought Circus Minimus on the table.

Circus Minimus

Circus Maximus, the old Avalon Hill classic chariot game is one we bought several years ago but unfortunately didn’t play that often. The ugly counters and the rather complicated structure of the rule book weren’t really helpful to get it on the gaming table on a more regular base and so I can only remember that we played it one day with the above mentioned friend, but that was years ago and as far as I can remember, we didn’t even use the advanced rules. Chariot racing is a great topic, though, so when MMP sold Circus Minimus as a special offer for 10 bucks, we bought it and laminated the map. So there it was, sitting on the shelf and waiting, and since we were the same three folks who played Circus Maximus years ago, we were all very interested to try out this Minimus version.

We laid out the map, which is better looking than the plain yellow – although mounted – Avalon Hill board, and sorted the counters, which are also much better looking. Denny and I had played Circus Minimus once several weeks ago, so she could explain it to Wolfgang while I also listened to get back into it.

Getting into the game was quite fast and easy and we chose our chariots, bought our equipment, let the die tell us who could choose their position first and when the chariots were on the track, we looked up to the Emperor and saw the sign for the start of the race… ok ok… we had some beers

Chariot racing in Ancient Rome

Everybody chose to hard whip the horses to get some speed and hopefully a good first position and everybody tried to drive rather close to the ‘spina’ in the middle of the track. Wolfgang and I had bought weapons, like a Trident and an additional whip just in case the original one would be lost in an attack on another driver, while Denny made some offerings to the Roman gods to have 6 re-rolls available if the die results would be bad for her, or good for her opponents.

The game plays quick and easy, because all you need to know is listed on your player chart directly printed on the map, you can see how fast the horses are going, if there’s any fatigue to deal with, what weapons can be used when and so on. Wolfgang’s chariot established a good position in the field, quite far ahead of Denny’s and my own chariot and so I was tempted to whip my horses to take the next corner in a more speedy way to catch up. My chariot had a speed of 10 when I approached the corner, so I used the ‘brake’ by drawing back the reins but still came in with a racy speed of 8… very fast for taking corners and I thought ‘This idea wasn’t too good…’ And of course all things went wrong for me, I slid with the chariot into one of the inner lanes and that made me  actually face the wall and the chariot was still driving, but before I could try to adapt to that dangerous situation, the chariot… flipped! I was still connected to the horses with the rains which didn’t see any reason to slow down and at least I took the corner and was in sight of Wolfgang’s chariot as planned  – but without my chariot, the horses dragging me behind… which was not according to my plan. But the game allows you to cut yourself lose, running to the outer lane and try to stop your horses, get back on the chariot and drive on, so not everything was lost – or so I thought…

The game definitely looks better than its ugly predecessor, Circus Maximus

Denny was still behind me with thundering hooves, but then slowed down and took the corner in a much slower speed, but also in a much safer way than I did and so the race went on, she behind me, Wolfgang in front of me and I – dust in my face, couldn’t see that much, really – being dragged by the horses as a solid no. 2.

As the race went on, I tried each turn to cut loose myself from the rains but also failed each time. After being dragged over half the track I was severely injured and out of the game. Wolfgang was still leading the race, Denny a dozen spaces behind him and so we decided that it wouldn’t make much sense to continue the race since it was already a bit late. So we cleaned everything up and would come back to the Circus after breakfast next morning.

Monday was the last day for our multiplayer sessions because Denny had to leave us in the evening, so we were at the gaming table quite early and ready to do everything better in the chariot race. Chariots were chosen, equipment bought and the lines on the track chosen as starting positions and this time I bought a war chariot, much better for ramming attacks than the normal one (and contrary to Circus Maximus, it’s not slower than a lighter chariot). Denny and Wolfgang each decided that they had a little party the night before (you can ‘buy’ an option that gives the opponent a certain malus to make the race a bit more interesting for them…) so both started with a malus when checking the skid table (being tired means you can’t control the chariot that good and you are likely to have problems when coming in too fast), which was something I liked to hear, since I was fresh. I bought a whip, Wolfgang a net and Denny made her usual offerings to the gods, to get some re-rolls. Go! said the Emperor…

We had an interesting race, I whipping the horses of Denny’s chariot as soon as we were close to each other to make them go faster and causing some trouble for her in the next corner, then whipping Wolfgang right in the face (my driver his driver, please don’t get a wrong picture of our meetings…) when I came close to his chariot, so he had his first injury and then hard whipping my horses to get enough speed to make it for position  no. 1….

"I will whip you to death and pierce you with my trident!!!"

Wolfgang and Denny were behind me and got into a little fight that made Wolfgang lose control and being knocked off the chariot! The horses went on running, though and I was already considering my options to squelch him when I came around again. In the next turns, I tried to ram the empty chariot to make it a poor choice for him to get back into it again. The chariot was between me and the wall and while I got one damage, the chariot rammed got two – worked for me – and then I went past, again whipping the horses, I needed speed. Wolfgang tried to run over the track to get into a position that would help him to get on Denny’s chariot and she of course used that to try to run over him, but he was able to jump away. After that he indeed succeeded and was able to get in her chariot. We used the advanced option rule that allows two folks being in the captured chariot, the owner still drives while the ‘guest’ is fist-fighting him and that goes on until one of them gives up and jumps out, or one is killed in that fight. Seeing that I decided there’s no need to risk my own chariot in ram attacks against the empty chariot and so I used the situation to take corners safely and get some speed and advantage on the straight part of the track with the possible option to ram whoever is left over driving Denny’s chariot. They were fighting on over several turns and eventually Denny won, dumping Wolfgang’s corpse out of her chariot to get back on track in the race. In the meantime I was quite ahead of her and with the third player out of the game, we decided it would make more sense, to quit and set up another game. Whew, what a ride

Circus Minimus is a nice game and does many things better than Circus Maximus and still you have a lot of options although there are less rules. Unfortunately these rules have a few holes and all in all we had 9 questions that couldn’t be answered by the rule book and quite important ones like can you do a whip attack and then attack with a weapon? Can you ram and make a weapon attack, or just ram and a whip attack? How is ‘adjacent’ actually defined in the game? Can a running charioteer move through a space where a chariot is located? And so on…I won’t go into more details, because Circus Minimus will get a HFC review as well (perhaps also a comparison with Circus Maximus), but these holes in the rules are a bit disappointing and Wolfgang said that while Circus Minimus is of course much easier to get into compared with Circus Maximus, it’s probably as difficult to play with the RAW if you don’t want to use house rules. He has a point here, I have to admit. Anyway, chariot racing is fun and again the game does more things right than wrong , but it has a few problems.

Zombie State – Diplomacy of the Dead

A strategic-level-zombie game: Zombie State: Diplomacy of the Dead

All players are fighting the zombie threat in their territories, but the game isn't a cooperative game!

So, the day was still young, so to say, and we had another new game on the shelf that we only played with two players so far and now wanted to try out with three - Zombie State, Diplomacy of the Dead.

Since we are also planning to write an extensive review about this game, here’s it in short. Every player is the head of a country, we had Asia, Africa and Europe in play and a global virus infection takes place turning the population into zombies, or ‘zeds’ as they are usually called among zombie friends

Every player has a great deal of options to use different technologies and scientific research to keep their population healthy and getting rid of the zombie problem. There are three tech trees you can use to choose different approaches, for example a military strategy to kill the zeds, a medical tree to heal and vaccinate the population or to evacuate folks into another area or pure physics, like researching new technologies to control the behavior of the zeds etc..

Resource management is an important aspect of the game

Set up is quick and easy, Denny was the Asian leader, Wolfgang led Africa and I was responsible for Europe. All these countries/nations do have different resources which they produce (wood/metal, food, chemical stuff and fuel) and of course you need resources for everything, be that tanks being produced in your factories, or trying to make a scientific breakthrough of some kind. The countries have different borders, Africa is connected to Asia over the sea, Europe is not, but has both Asia and Africa as neighbors – and having many borders to defend is bad in this game.

The game may be colorful and not very complex, but fighting the zombie threat nevertheless requires tough decision-making

When I played the game for the first time with Denny some months ago, I chose the military tech tree to deal with the zed problem and that worked quite well , but I still lost that game because at some point I simply couldn’t get as much tanks on the board as were needed to actually hold off the zombie hordes and because I didn’t have much options left in terms of technologies. Military was my focus but I also tried things from the other two tech trees and that made me running low on the later much-needed resources to produce enough tanks.

So this time I wanted to choose a different strategy and I decided to only use the physics tech tree. There’s one interesting technology which is utilizing sonic beams (if you are able to get it to work, of course), a sound technology which attracts zombies to one specific area within your borders and – which was much more interesting for me – to an area adjacent to your borders. The technology is costly, though, because to use it you have to use one of your freedom points (action points) for every point you want to add to a die (dice are used to mark the population level and zombies feed on that population and if all inhabitants are zombified, the now larger mob moves on to an adjacent area with the highest population). That means, if you really want to maximize the usefulness of this tech and if you want it to have any significant effect in the game, you can’t do much besides using your sonic beams…

The entire population of South East Asia turned into zombies...

But I wanted to try this strategy out because the idea to just lure the zeds away from my country to the areas of my opponents, seemed to be quite nice.

Denny and Wolfgang used a combination of different technologies in the game, Wolfgang was the first one who used the military. The game went on and I was actually able to get the sound to work and almost every turn I used all of my actions to raise the dice in Denny’s and Wolfgang’s areas that were adjacent to my zones, which made them a major attraction to all zombies nearby. This way I was able to channel the zombies from my areas to the borders and then send them over to Asia and/or Africa.

When they had fed on these border areas, they moved on to the population centers deeper in these countries and the areas adjacent to Europe were left empty. Empty areas are a buffer zone, because without anything alive there and without Zombies, no new zombies will be attracted to these zones and that was the plan – having a clear zone around Europe so no new mobs could get in and then being able to deal with any zombies left in my territory.

Zombie State is an "independent" game without a big publisher, but has a very good production quality nevertheless

I was pleased to realize that Asia and Africa came into trouble rather quickly and neither Denny nor Wolfgang were able to reduce the zed stacks enough. Both constantly lost population while the zombies marauded from area to area. Some of them used the sea connection from Africa to Asia to make their way to Denny’s territory as well. To make things worse, I sent new zombie stacks over to them almost every turn.

I had many resources collected because I only needed to spend my freedom points to use the now activated technology and couldn’t do much more besides this, but it worked as it should. The only time I got into trouble was when an outbreak occurred within one of my areas. But since I didn’t have as many zombies around as the other players, the outbreaks weren’t that much of threat and I could control them, later even with producing tanks to kill them. This was especially true for the end game because (with empty borders around Europe) I couldn’t use the sound tech anymore (you can only raise the number of dots on a die, not place a die into an empty area), so I could spend freedom points and my resources for building tanks.

Wolfgang was the first who lost every living human to the zombie hordes and was out of the game with Africa completely overrun with dead men walking, while Denny was able to retreat to Australia and barricade it in order to save what was left on her last population die. The first player without population triggers the end game and after this turn was over, we counted the population on our dice and I had 15 points left, so I won the game.

We all agreed that this is a fantastic game, it has considerable reply value and lots of options and strategies to explore. The components are great, the ideas are innovative and it’s really fun to play if you like zombies. Wait for the review to see why you must buy it

Zombies!!! The Boardgame

Zombies - The board game: This one's a no-brainer!

Being in the zombie mood now (and still having some hours left before Denny had to leave), we brought Zombies!!! on the table, the classic zombie game published by Twilight Creations. We own the core set with three expansions mixed in and we hadn’t played the game for quite a while now. Wolfgang, who is a big fan of the game but can’t bring his partner to play board games as often as he would like to (she enjoys playing the card game “Bridge”, but for some reason all the games we play, don’t really interest her), was eager to play this one.

Set up is also easy and quick, we went through the short rules once and were ready to go. In each turn, the active player lays out a map tile, puts  zombies on it, draws cards, moves his ‘shotgun guy’ (the little figure used as the player marker on the maps) and moves zombies (usually away from yourself and towards the opponents).

You win the game when you see (read: find) the helicopter pad and use the heli to escape (read: you reach the field in the middle of the tile after killing all zombies there). The game is fast and fun and the cards have outstanding artwork and often nasty effects you can use to make things harder for your opponents, or easier for yourself. There’s another way to win, though by just killing zombies and when you have 25 Zeds collected, you are the Zombie Hunter and you win.

It’s not that easy, though, because you have only up to 5 live tokens and although you can collect bullet tokens which allow for re-rolls, they are often spent in the fights, so if you rely on fighting and killing zombies instead of running to the heli pad, you likely first run out of ammo and then out of live… but if you are dead, you’re not out of the game – you simply ‘respawn’ in the center of the town, but you lose half of your zombies trophies you collected during your last ‘incarnation’ and you are usually far away from the heli pad (if that has been found until then at all). Each death sets you back and makes it easier for your still living opponents to either shoot enough zeds to win or to find the heli pad and reach it before you.

Watch out! Zombies are highly contagious!

We had a great time, as usual when playing this game, and it was some tense back and forth and respawning. In the later turns, I had a great hand of cards allowing me to find some cool weapon in a building, the heli pad was in reach for me and both Denny and Wolfgang were far away and not likely to make it in time. But first I had to get into a building to search and hopefully find that weapon (read: to play that card) and of course my opponents realized that I was trying to get into a building for some reason…

So they moved zombies into my place as often as they could to slow me down and hopefully get me killed in the end. I managed to beat the zeds however and was always close to the door but couldn’t get into the building because of bad movement rolls.

Denny found a fire axe in her turn and *surprise* I also found one at the same time (read: I played a card that copied the weapon another player just found) and I thought now I would have an easy time getting into the building to find the weapon I was after, and with two weapons and fresh life and bullet tokens also available in the building and in reach of the heli pad… things looked good. I also had over 20 zombies collected and a card that allowed me to keep all zombies instead of giving away 50% if I got killed! I was sure I would win… since my chances were equally good to fulfill both victory conditions – but if you are too sure, things usually start turning against you…

The town is overrun!

In my turn, I killed the zombie in my place, made a good movement roll and finally made it into the damned building… I just said grinning ‘I play a card which states….’ and Wolfgang’s voice boomed over the table ‘STOP! I play…’ and to my horror (my grinning was gone instantly) he played a card that forced me to discard my entire hand of cards immediately! I lost the weapon I was trying to find in that building and the card that allowed me to keep the zombies if being eaten up by them, which crashed my entire plan.

So my poor shotgun guy was in that building, running low on bullets, with no weapon (even the fire axe was countered by another card in play and couldn’t be used either) – but with lots of hungry zeds all around me… and of course I died in that turn, loosing half of my collection and respawning back in town, far away from the heli pad. Situations like these make this game so great, everything can happen all the time and the players always try to make it a trip on a bumpy road for all other players.

In the end it was Mr Red against Mr. Black, because Mrs Green had to bail out to prepare for her trip back home (the player figures are colored and we always name the players Mr(s) *say color*), and Mr. Red now being that far away from the heli pad decided to hunt zombies to make it for the 25 zeds win since he also was over 20. I couldn’t do much anymore, because I was now down to 11 zeds and so Mr Red won the Zombie Hunter crown and the game. Great game and pure simple fun from start to finish!

More infected victims!

This was the last game for our meeting, Denny said goodbye, Wolfgang and me cleaned the table, prepared for the meal and had a few more beers over the evening while watching DVDs (“Punisher Warzone” and the animated Marvel comic “Dr. Strange”) to chill out.

He left the next morning and drove home to Mainz and that was the end of this years’ Operation Red Nose. Again, it has been much fun with all the different and new games and we were able to test out the multiplayer aspect of some of these games, which will be taken into account for the next reviews in the pipeline.

I hope everybody had as much fun as I had and I’m looking forward to the next meeting

Death Angel: Mission Pack 1 Expansion

Your mission is not over, and failure is not an option.

While you may have survived the harrowing challenges of Death Angel, the mission is far from over. The Mission Pack 1Print on Demand expansion brings twelve new Location cards to provide alternate missions for players. These cards are seamlessly incorporated into your Death Angel game – simply choose whether you want to use the standard Location cards or the ones found in this Mission Pack and build your mission as normal.

But beware! New terrors have emerged in the form of Adrenal Genestealers: deathly agile and relentless. These dangerous new foes will pop out from every dark corner, unleashing attack after attack.

Also included in Mission Pack 1 is an all-new Terrain card, that will threaten to thrust unfortunate space marines out into the cold embrace of space.

 

 

Death Angel: Space Marine Pack 1 Expansion

Rally your battle brothers with the Death Angel Space Marine Pack 1 expansion!

Space Marine Packs introduce brand new combat teams to your game, ready to blast their way into the carnage that is Death Angel.

The Space Marine Pack 1 Print on Demand expansion comes complete with two new Combat Teams and their respective Action cards. The deadly Chaplain Raziel brings his ironclad faith to the fight while Brother Adron readies his Cyclone Missile Launcher for absolute devastation. These new Combat Teams can be seamlessly incorporated into your Death Angel games to provide more versatility and more options.

Also included in the Space Marine Pack 1 are 8 Combat Team cards, which replace the original 6 Combat Team markers from the Death Angel game, making it easier to randomise and select your teams.

 

That’s an interesting idea and hopefully now good games that perhaps didn’t fulfill FFG high expectations regarding sales will now get cool new stuff for those players who own them and enjoy them. We would like to see Print on Demand expansions for example for games like Marvel Heroes – The Boardgame or Middle-earth Quest.

The Space Hulk expansions can be ordered here

Game

Platform: XBox 360
Publisher: THQ, 2011
Developer: Kaos Studios
ESRB: M
Genre: FPS
Setting: speculative fiction
Players: 1/32 (offline / online)

Introduction

When I consider all the games that will be published this year and especially the shooter games, then actually 2011 is a great time for fans of the Xbox 360 and for all those who still look for their holy grail of shooters. I know, because that’s my personal quest this year (to use a bit of RPG language). So many big names and so many not-so-big-names are competing for the shooter crown this year that I think the chance to find this sort of a holy grail in the genre can’t get any better. I mean, there has to be one or more real hit when you read the 2011 titles like Gears of War 3, Bulletstorm, Brink, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Section 8: Prejudice, Earth Defense Force: Armageddon, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty Black Ops, Crysis 2, Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine and many many more.I don’t know why 2011 is such a shooter-heavy year, but it is – and I like it.

The US under Korean occupation

So, as an Xbox 360 guy, I am prepared to play some great games this year and as a wargamer, shooters are part of my hobby and I was – and still am – really looking forward to playing some hopefully good or even outstanding shooter games.

I played CoD: Black Ops, which was extremely disappointing as a single player experience (I loved the SP campaigns of MW 1 and MW 2, but Treyarch simply can’t create convincing campaigns, the campaign in World at War wasn’t that much fun, either. This time, though, they just packed in as many enemies as possible, in as tight corridors as possible, turned off the AI completely and said ‘go, shoot everything that moves or that just stands dumb around and have… ehh… ‘fun’), but which is probably the best CoD multiplayer so far. It’s interesting that a game can be as shitty and as great all at the same time, but unfortunately if you are not an online gaming competition guy, you don’t get much for your money. Anyway, this is not about BLOPS, but the SP/MP dichotomy reminds me a bit of Homefront.

I also played Bulletstorm, which is a great game, in the SP campaign and the MP coop mode, it’s completely over the top in what it does, and it does it all damn well. It’s extremely fun to play, it’s that simple. But BS is not a game I play as a wargamer and so I was still waiting for a game that would give me a certain military setting and a bit more sim-like combat than the usual military arcade shooter fun. And so things got interesting when I first heard about Homefront.

Homefront is a game done by the folks who did Frontlines: Fuel of War, which I did not play (except for the demo). I don’t remember why that game wasn’t on my to-play-list, but when it returned to my radar, noone was playing it anymore, so it was pointless to start playing it online. That’s a general problem with online shooters (except for the really big names in the field) – if you come too late to the party, everybody else has already moved on to the next battlefield and the online area is a wasteland.

The Homefront launch was supported by a big public relations campaign or one might say propaganda machine. Ads everywhere, Microsoft made a special deal with THQ that DLC will come out for the 360 first, the developers hyped their own game over the top at any given opprtunity, they got more than one nomination and you got the impression it’s the best thing you could play on any system, new features, new setting, ‘we will make everything better than everybody else’, ‘we can compete with the Big Ones’, ‘yes, we CAN beat CoD‘, a game that will get you really into emotion and so on. They sounded really convincing and from what I could watch (all the trailers and interviews and movies and stuff) and read, everything looked actually damn fine. They had experience with online shooters as well and said they will bring 32 player together which is a rare thing on consoles (Frontlines even had 50 something on the Xbox 360) and that convinced me to preorder it. I also read the novel (which is quite enjoyable) and watched the movie Red Dawn (which is downright trash and not enjoyable), so I was prepared with a background story and ready for a great game and excited when the game eventually arrived from the UK.

This is just to tell you that I wanted to like this game, I really wanted to like it and I was open for what the developers would show me as a new emotional, immersive shooter experience. They said they wanted to establish their own universe, their own big shooter franchise with Homefront and there were even early talks about sequels and all, so after reading the novel I was prepared to be part of the Resistance and get it going… and so I put the game into my console and started the campaign. Here’s what I found in this great new shooter, fasten your seatbelt, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is going to be a helluva rough ride and a crash landing, enjoy your drinks while you can.

Story or what’s all the hype about?

Well, you may call it story or plot or whatever you like, but so far it’s a matter of fact that shooters seldom introduce you to stellar storytelling. Usually you get some short hints why you are the one killing everybody in sight over the next hours and that you have to do it, either because you are a cool guy, or you belong to a band of cool guys, or at least some cool guy has to be rescued by you, stuff like that. You listen to it, you read it, while thinking ‘jeez, stop it already and let’s go on with it, I have been playing these games for years now, it’s just shoot and don’t get shot, so let’s do this.’

Bad-ass evil Koreans torturing and killing helpless US citizens!

KAOS had the story and plot penned by John Milius, the co-writer of Apocalypse Now and the director and writer of Red Dawn (this trash movie I mentioned already) so at least there was some potential of a good story in the game. So, first the rough outline of the story, so you know what’s it all about.

The story Homefront is telling you is certainly far from being convincing, or something you never heard before so you are thrilled because of that. Nope, it’s sort of an alternate reality where North Korea is more powerful than she is in our reality and both the USA and the States of the European Union are much less powerful than they are in real life. It is assumed that North Korea first is the driving factor for the reunion with South Korea (LOL) and then starts a war with Japan and after that is preparing a sinister plan to invade the USA after shutting down all systems with an EMP blast from the sky.

It is said that Americans have this underlying fear of being invaded, and so the idea that paratroopers drop from the sky right into your nice little gardens where intruders want to establish a new world order for the American way of life sounds at least interesting, even if not plausible at all, and it may explain the interest the game started in the USA. I think that’s something which can be successful big time only in the US, because I can’t imagine that such a setting in Germany would really grab folks emotionally. Fighting in our homeland against evil Asian intruders to keep our freedom… really, who gives a shit? We just don’t have this kind of emotional patriotic fuel anymore, we burned it all in two World Wars and there’s nothing left for such games I suppose .

So, that may explain why the game is selling well, mostly in the USA I believe, despite what to call flaws would be an understatement. Anyway, the game starts with a cinematic introduction of what happened and finally led to the occupation with a mix of real life TV clips and computer clips and this intro works well and looks stunning.

Unfortunately, it isn’t really new and in my view too much of a direct copy of what has been done by Treyarch in CoD: World at War (video link) before and it is the first time (not the last time, though) you realize that KAOS tried hard to copy the feel of the successful Call of Duty games.

After the intro, you learn that you are one Robert Jacobs, a Marine helicopter pilot living during the time of the occupation. One morning, you are surprised by Korean soldiers knocking at the door who then take you away as a prisoner. It doesn’t become clear why, but you are taken away after being knocked down with the rifle butt, learning to follow the hard way (and the whole game is indeed about learning to follow, as we will see…). You end up sitting chained in a bus which is supposed to drive you to some concentration camp and this gives you plenty of time to look around and to see what’s going on (an idea which isn’t entirely new; the car ride to your own execution in Modern Warfare 1 was a similar experience).

Here the game introduces you to the reality of occupied America: you see Korean soldiers shooting people, torturing people, killing parents in front of their children and all that in the open, on the streets on a sunny day. The developers said that this sort of emotional scenes will be a big part of the game in order to grab you emotionally by what’s going on, and you shall learn to hate the occupants because of what you see – which will give you the reason to join the resistance and fight for freedom.

The reviews which were all praise for the game or also those which at least said, it’s ‘quite a good one’ agreed that “this is a strong aspect of the game” and that “it works, there have never been such emotions in a shooter before”… aha, good to know.

You don’t sit long in the bus, though, before a truck rams it. You get almost knocked out by the impact and then you are rescued by a guy telling you ‘you can thank me later’ and that you should grab a gun or something and when you follow him around the next corner, a gunfight starts immediately with the first waves of enemies and you realize ‘oh! I’m in the Resistance now’…

An oasis in occupied America. No, you can't explore it and learn more about your fellow Resistance members.

After this firefight, you are introduced to Boone Karlson, a former police officer and now the guy responsible for a resistance cell which is hiding in a small American town and living there in some sort of little Findhorn community or so it seems when you walk around, called the Oasis. Energy is generated by solar power, you see children playing while the sun is shining, people are working, a guy using a stepper for pumping water by manpower, Little Eden so to say. You don’t have much time to hang around, though, because the first mission is starting already and from then on it’s all generic shooting and the usual stuff you can expect from any average shooter. You can walk around and talk to your fellow resistance fighters, women and men, by pressing the x button, but they don’t tell you much except for forgettable one-liners about nothing. The location is also very restricted, so that you can’t go and talk to everybody there, just to a few guys and that was something which gave me a bad taste already. I mean, the idea is here to use this as a way to further get to know the background of the folks involved and all, and then you can only ask a few folks giving you some blabla replies… I don’t expect RPG-like dialogue options, but if it is that pointless, then better skip this ‘press x to talk’ altogether.

So that’s where you are at the beginning of this ‘emotional story-centric’ new shooter, you don’t know much about what is going on (it helps if you read the novel before, but not all players will do that and they said the game will tell you a great story, not the novel) and then the first mission simply starts. For those who like to crawl around in shooters: there are some newspapers to find as ‘collectibles’ (stuff I hate in shooters, I don’t slow down the action to search for damned collectibles… a friend of mine is addicted to searching things like that and after each fight everything goes into slow-mo and the room will be inspected, interior decoration will be destroyed to see if something is hidden there… it completely takes out any drive in a shooter) and the newspaper articles expand your knowledge about the background of the story a bit. But that’s not the best way to introduce the player to what is really going on because if you don’t like that searching around in this and that corner, you will simply take whatever newspaper you find and not bother with the ones you didn’t come across.

Gameplay or why it’s a blessing the game is over in 5 hours…

These turrets are threatening... when you meet them for the first time. Like all good ideas, they are greatly over-used, so after a while, they become lame

There’s been a trend in shooter games over the last years and that is: the campaign a.k.a. the single player experience is getting shorter and shorter and the online multiplayer part is getting bigger and more elaborated. Usually this is not really a good deal, because a game should deliver the whole package for both, the player wanting to play the campaign/story and the player who is into multiplayer online competition. Reviews about Homefront of course now mention that this game has an even shorter campaign than the CoD: Modern Warfare and Black Ops titles, which were all around 5-6 hours or so and they complain about it… but there’s one good reason that a game has such a short campaign. It’s probably not true for all games and I liked the MW single player experience a good deal and they could have made them a bit longer if you ask me, but the 5 hours in Homefront were enough. The game is so short because it’s so bad and the developers seemed to have some compassion to not make it longer and for that I’m thankful. It started to get boring real soon and the campaign fails big-time when you compare it with all the hype that was made about it and with what the designers told us would be their goal.

Follow me…

Of course, the campaign is utilizing different tools and ways to introduce you to the overall story, other than, say, the novel does, but to make a story convincing at all, you need some emotional link to what is happening around you. That connection should have been the identification of the player with the character they are playing. The fact that this character has no voice is part of the developers’ clever strategy to help you identifying with that character. That’s not my interpretation, it’s what one KAOS guy said in an interview and hey, what better way to feel yourself well represented in a game than by a mute guy who’s is always following orders, even if it just to move here or there.

If that’s not really you, then you’ll have to adapt to that fast because the game is barking orders at you all the time ‘do this, don’t do that, move here, not there, come here now, shoot him, shoot him now, pick up this, pick up that, come back’ and you have only seconds to realize what you are expected to do in a given situation before a NPC will remind you again what to do now by repeating the order over and over again. After 1 hour in the game you feel like a brainwashed dumbass moving around like a puppet on someone’s strings.

Just in case you forget where to go...

To ensure that you don’t forget that, you have to follow a guy named Connor through the campaign. It’s that tough guy stereotype who is part of all these games and movies. He is hating the Koreans to the bone and is always happy to pull the trigger to put one of them out of his misery. He’s the leader on the missions and so you have to follow him. Since it wouldn’t help you to just be told that once (obviously, KAOS makes games for the average gamer who is supposed to be not that bright), a white dot is always hovering over Connors’ head with the word ‘follow‘ (another reminder just in case you forgot what the white dot is there for)…

It strongly reminded me of that yellow dot with the word ‘follow’ in the campaign of CoD: Black Ops, and it’s as silly and destroying any immersion. Sure, in an open world game you might get lost and then you would probably miss some great scripted scenes the game has in offer for you… but even if that was the idea behind it, it’s nonsense, because the game is tunneling you through one of the tightest corridor designs I ever played. CoD levels feel wide open compared to that, you cannot go left or right, there’s exactly one way you can go while someone is constantly barking ‘follow me’ and you see that white dot with the word ‘follow’ before you… or behind you!

…but slowly

Rianna, the sterotype belly-top chick with gun... the face animations strongly remind of Morrowind (XBox 1)

Yes, behind you. Connor, an ex-military, who is supposed to be the leader of the troop, an electrical engineer and a mechanic named Hopper Lee (a third generation Korean-American to spice up the characters a bit it seems, you know, tension because of identity, hate from Americans because he looks like the occupants etc. – but nothing is done to actually explore and develop that character background, he’s merely a third generation Korean-American, that’s all), a survival-expert women named Rianna and you, the dumb pilot from nowhere, are shambling around like Romero Zombies. Movement is generally very slow in the game and even running feels slow, it’s like you are constantly walking through thick snow or something like that. When you played a fast shooter before, it will drive you crazy first, later you will adapt to it, sure, but chances are good that the campaign is over just in time when you feel comfortable with the ‘speed’ of the game.

So, you have exactly two choices when playing the campaign. You either walk even slower than Connor to actually follow him, which is like walking in Indian file, or you move like a normal man would do and then the guy you have to follow is always behind you, the big white dot and the word ‘follow’ always on your screen, behind you… it’s so damn silly that it actually made me laugh more than once, but it is not funny, trust me, it’s getting on your nerves. You might say now, ‘just forget the follow thingy and move on’ but that isn’t what the designers had in mind because there’s a strict order in the Resistance how things happen and especially how people move through a door.

Another stereotype: the aggressive, narrow-minded ex-military "kill'em all" bad-ass guy with army-style Mohawk haircut

Part of the clever campaign design is that each mission takes place in a certain location where all the shooting happens. In order to get from one location to the next, you usually have to open a door, so you can move through a house, a fence or a hallway. But you can not do it yourself because of the ranking perhaps (except for one door in the whole game, where you seem to be trusted enough now by your Resistance friends that you are actually allowed to gently press the X button to smash a door open – and it felt great, really, this freedom… awesome). So every time you come across a door (which is sometimes disguised as a locker or something like that in front of a hole) – and there are many doors indeed – the following happens:

Connor and Rianna are in front of you and Connor gets slowly into position on the left side, Rianna on the right side of the door. You stand there, dumb and listening, because every time some blabla starts and you are again told what to do, then Connor or Rianna opens the door (usually by just smashing it) and then first Connor moves – sloooowly – through the open door, then Rianna does the same, also slooowly and then it’s your time to, yep dude, you know what comes now, ‘follow’ them. This happens all the time!

It will make you shoot at Connor sooner or later… but nothing happens if you do that. If you shoot friendlies, which I usually do just to see the reaction of the AI, nothing happens, the bullets hit them and they look at you like cows, no comment, no nothing. Silly. I remember Operation Flashpoint: Elite on the Xbox 1 where fellow soldiers first said ‘hold your fire’ when you hit them and if you wouldn’t stop, they shot you dead – mission over. Such details help to create an illusion that the NPCs act in a reasonable way which will help you to enjoy the whole experience a lot more. Not in Homefront, NPCs are bots and you can see it with every step they do. So we come to…

Mission design and AI…

The missions in the campaign then try to suck you into the story of ‘occupation by Asian bad boys – fighting in your homeland – defend Burger King – you fight for young American ladies and their crying baby’ stuff, but unfortunately they do this by sending you out on the average shooter mission again and again. Go there and destroy that, go there and shoot him, come back and then go again to do it all over again. There’s no mission that would give you the feeling of being part of something interesting or new, let alone emotional. It’s always this bad taste in your gamer mouth of been there, done that.. and that in several other games and often much better than what Homefront is trying to do.

I remember watching a video with a presentation by one of the designers where he played a mission when the Resistance fighters had to hold off some Korean soldiers who were attacking a house with a young mother and a crying baby inside. He was so excited to show us just an example of how different Homefront would be because now you have some real task, to protect a little baby and a desperate mother, it’s not just defending a position, it’s defending an American baby crying because of all the shooting around. He said it’s an example how Homefront does something never done before by ‘marrying FPS experience with great storytelling’.  Although I agree that such a situation is able to evoke more emotions than the usual ‘hold position until the next script kicks in’ order, what I saw was not that immersive or impressive because the AI seemed to be extremely dumb, just standing there and shooting… ok, it was a presentation and not the final game, so I had great hopes for such situations to really pull it off emotionally. Here’s it, the great storytelling and what was never done before:

I mean come on, relax, here’s nothing new at all and no there’s no ‘different pathing’ as he says in the video, since why the heck would you jump out of that window in such a situation? To use such a ‘path’ must have some sense in battle and regarding the situation he talks about, you would then simply stand in front of the house, there’s no way to outflank the enemies because the game wants you to fight inside the house and then move through a door at the opposite side of that window. When I actually played this mission in the game, it was as boring as this presentation because the AI appeared out of nowhere and started to flood in en masse and then just stood there shooting like robots. No ducking, no taking cover, no real maneuver, nothing… and then the baby crying behind you all the time was not something that would cause some immersion, but it was just annoying as hell because it didn’t fit to what was going on in the mission and the firefight was quite long. In addition, the Mother was shouting the same speech samples over and over again, which added to the acoustic annoyance. So you were shooting these brainless enemies for several minutes, wave after wave streaming into that house while the baby was crying and the Mother was shouting her one line “Don’t hurt my Baby!”.

Not very touching: a baby with a plain texture face

There was no danger neither for yourself nor for the mother with her child. No bullets hit them, nor you because these robots couldn’t shoot that well (you remember the stormtroopers from the Star Wars movies, don’t you? These guys are sharpshooters compared to the Koreans I encountered in that innovative  ‘defend the baby’ mission) and so the overall experience was lame and boring. Better AI and less enemies able to scare the player by coming into the house and using cover and aiming well and actually capable of inflicting collateral damage to the mother and her baby if you are not good enough to defend their lifes… that could have been a great mission if it were not that badly designed. This mission was the first of many occasions when I realized that the designers had some good ideas and the game as such had great potential but it was not used at all, they threw out of the window what they had by simply failing to design a good mission while apparently believing they had created the Stone of the Wise regarding missions and overall gameplay.

And they tried so hard to play with the Big Ones (which was what we were told over and over in the interviews before the game came out) and you can actually see it. From start to finish of the game, you can actually feel how desperately KAOS tried to copy the known Call of Duty-Cinematic-Script-Orgy, but they absolutely fail in being successful here. Part of it is the boring design of the missions and they are so boring that even if something loud and blinding happens once in a while, you are not thrilled at all, you just feel disturbed by it in your general weariness the game puts you in from the start of the campaign. A big bam here and there and stuff flying into your face once in a while is just not enough if the overall cinematic design is simply bad.

There is more than one mission where we can see Korean soldiers set on fire and screaming due to some explosion and it gets old when it happens that often. And it clearly is trying to copy some CoD:WaW scenes but with the bad gfx, it has no emotional impact, it just looks bad. And the usual good guy/bad guy stereotype…whenever I came across screaming burning soldiers, Rianna told me to make an end of their suffering *oh that emotional gameplay* while tough-as-nails Connor said something like ‘let them burn, the motherfuckers’… yeah I didn’t expect something different. That’s the great narrative and emotional setting that was never done before in shooters? Give me a break, really…

AI soldiers are masters of the "retro-dance": duck behind cover - head pops up - shoots - duck behind cover - head pops up - shoots... rinse and repeat!

There are also logical errors in the design of some missions. For example, you walk around in sunshine in the Resistance hiding place and Boone and Connor tell you something like ‘grab a gun, we need you on tonights’ mission blabla’ and then you immediately follow them through a tunnel (having severe difficulties to get down the ladder because you have to wait for the ‘press x button’ message which will only appear if you stand exactly where the game expects you to stand) and on the other side of the tunnel some 50 meters way at best, it’s suddenly night and pitch dark outside. Just doesn’t make sense, the sun isn’t going down that fast, not even under Korean occupation, it’s bad design, someone didn’t pay attention to what was going on in the mission. Someone told me about a similar experience, he went into a house while it was dark outside. He enters the house and looks through a window – and the sun is shining brightly outside… I don’t remember that, but if it happens once, there’s a good chance that it happens twice. Such things kill any immersion. Pay attention when designing your games, gosh darn it!

And then the great AI, it is as thick as two short planks, both the Korean soldiers and your Resistance fighters. Enemies are always standing around and seldom use cover and if they do, they then make the ‘retro dance‘ we all know so well from older games, head goes down, head comes up, guy is shooting, head goes down, head pops up at the very same part of the cover, guy shoots, head goes down. Killing any fun in a firefight. Team-mates also like to stare at the wall while the action is in front of the wall, very innovative really…

I once had the situation (in the mission where you have to protect the Goliath against the EMP guys in the junkyard) that the enemies were on one side of the map only and my two bright partners were shooting like hell not only into the opposite direction but also into the sky! That looked as silly as it sounds and because of not being useful in the firefight, I again had to do it all alone against all enemies. When I then listen to the Devs speaking about the cool squad feeling and all, I can only laugh.

The script was written by the same author as Red Dawn... which explains a lot...

In another situation, Connor, Rianna and I were hiding behind a wall because a group of Korean soldiers was passing by. Connor told us to hide until they were out of sight and then dash across the street (wey hey, how stealthy!). Just before the formation was out of sight, one Korean soldier suddenly turned around and marched backwards. But this didn’t faze Connor; he gave the order: “Now! Move!” and he and Rianna ran out of cover and across the street, right in front of the Korean, who was totally disinterested. I then decided to follow them and almost bumped into the Korean who was stoically continuing his erratic path in the opposite direction. I even stopped in front of him and ‘waved at him’ by moving my rifle and jumping up and down, but he ignored me and stared into nowhere, still deserting his formation by walking towards the end of the map.

The enemies are also totally ignoring your team-mates and always go after the player, even if a Resistance fighter is standing right next to them. I once had Rianna walking – not running as you would expect in such a situation – to a door (hah! again, a closed door!) in a firefight and then she just stood there besides a Korean soldier behind cover. Nothing happened… neither she nor him were doing anything. When I wanted to follow her, the soldier got into action (I had obviously activated some trigger), doing his retro dance, throwing nades over to me, shooting, yelling… while Rianna stood there doing nothing. They also like to break through doors and windows all at once, so 10 guys make BOOM and they are there, immediately, like a well planned ambush big style. But it isn’t, you see that a trigger is activating all soldiers at once which looks just silly. You have to cross these trigger lines to make something happen at all, of course, or you’ll stand there forever without anything happening in a given situation.

Then KAOS goes back to using the old CoD trick of never ending enemy waves as well, which is one of  the things I don’t want to see anymore in a shooter. If you don’t get pass the trigger point which will make the enemy wave stop, you’ll sit there until the cows come home. If you shoot someone, a clone soldier will immediately come and stand in the exact same position as his friend before did, doing exactly the same animation as his predecesssor did. Boring and bad design I say and not what we want to the see anymore.

Here’s an example of the great AI in Homefront…

The checkpoints in the game are not well chosen either, especially not when you consider the way the missions are designed with all the wave respawning and the endless chatter before something happens. Imagine you listen for 25 seconds or longer to the blabla of your team-mates and then you go with them to get the job done. If you get killed, you will have to start again at the last checkpoint and this is usually before the chatter with your friends has started, so you sit there and have to listen to the same chatter again and there’s no way to get around this, you can’t skip it. If this happens more than twice because something stupid got you killed, you are close to simply quitting the game and playing something more enjoyable.

And sometimes you will get killed – because there’s no way to prevent it. I received more than once what seemed to me like a lovely ‘message’ from the designers in form of a grenade without warning, which kills you when you try to move to a place were you are just not allowed to be. Yep, such things happen. You try to move to that corner where some cover seems usable and BAM! you are dead because of an invisible grenade or mysterious explosion. You don’t see any guy throwing the grenade (because there isn’t any), there’s no warning symbol on your screen showing that and from where a nade is thrown at you, nothing, you are just dead – and then back to the checkpoint, my friend, which is as I said, usually before your team opened one of the myriad doors in the game and you know now what that means… Connor slowly going to the left side, Rianna on the right side, chatter blabla, smash open, Conner goes slowly first, then Rianna, then you…

Don't move too close to an object... the textures get muddy and blurry really soon

The fact that the locations are very small, thus giving you not enough room to maneuver, will also get you killed more than once. You are under fire, you look around and there’s a way… you run… and you realize there’s something between you and the cover, get shot dead, back to last checkpoint and the door. If you don’t follow the way the designers prepared for you, you will get killed, that’s my experience.

This location design combined with so many enemies at once and extremely stupid AI on both sides is a call for trouble, since you have to do it all alone and it just feels horrible. You can’t use tactics in these locations and there’s no cover system for shooting from behind objects. Best thing you can do is crawl behind cover and then give away only so much of your body which is needed to shoot at the enemies. But often the only good cover is used by your team-mates, so you either use a less appropriate object or you also use the same cover as they do, which means you stick behind them and see them idiotically stand up and shoot, then get shot several times but they won’t die from the shots and usually not doing damage to the enemy, either. In such situations you start to yell at the TV…

There’s no destruction and no penetration, every little thin object will make an enemy completely invulnerable. Even if there’s no destruction used in a game, penetration is essential, even CoD does have it, not to speak about the Battlefield games, because the weapons feel weird if you can only use them when you have a LOS to the enemy. Often the collision detection is bad, too, and that combined with the indestructible objects will cause the game not detecting a hit on your enemy if he is only barely visible. That is also true for the multiplayer where it is coming close to a game breaker when you see players going prone on a rooftop or crouch behind a wooden fence and while they can see and hit you, you can see them but not hit them because the game seems to think you hit the roof or the fence. By the way, you can see through a wire mash fence, but you cannot shoot through it. These are last-gen physics!

uncool and pointless: flying a helicopter in a tight, restricted area without any maneuvering options

There’s one mission in which you have to fly a helicopter (you are a pilot remember? That’s what makes you important for the Resistance!) and that at first seemed to be a more enjoyable mission… until I realized that there also was a very tight corridor, too tight for any flight maneuvers. Whenever I moved the heli into another direction to get a better shot at the enemies, I was warned by the game not to leave the battle zone. You have 15 seconds to get back on track or else it is mission over for you. It made flying absolutely pointless because you only try to stay as close to the convoy you have to protect (how often have we seen such missions? As the Devs said, innovation is key to Homefront…) as possible in order to avoid the ‘objective failed message’ and to avoid to start it all over again from the last checkpoint. KAOS, if you don’t want to give me some freedom to fly the damned thing, then for fuxx sake don’t put a helicopter in your game in the first place! Just make it a cut scene if you need a helicopter in your game… or let me fly 5 meter to the right or left!

Then there are silly glitches in the game, like you standing in one’s assault rifle which goes right thru your head or even in another person, for example Rianna or Connor. Folks are going through a ladder etc.. Then, sometimes the game has some weird ‘results’: In the mission where I was a sniper covering my team, I had to wait until a target had been marked so that I was allowed to shoot him. The guy comes round and has the wait marker above his head but the position was good so I shot – ‘mission over, objective failed’… clever design, it gives you such a great feeling of being a sniper who knows best when the sweet spot for the kill is reached. Ok, back to checkpoint and again. This time I waited until the ‘wait’ marker changed into the marker telling me that I’m now officially allowed to shoot, which I did like the robot I had been in this game from the first mission on. I pull the trigger, I hit the guy, the van next to him makes ‘whoosh’ and moves like a torpedo across the whole map killing another guy standing there…’mission over, objective failed, only shoot the marked target’. Ok, the guy killed by the torpedo van wasn’t marked and so the game rightfully sent me back to the checkpoint.

Such things make you actually pray that all the reviews were wrong and that the game doesn’t last as long as 5 hours…play-testing? Quality control?

Graphics

The ‘epic moments’ with which the game tries to impress you also fail because of the outdated graphics. Homefront often looks like a Xbox 1 game, poor textures, the characters look like made of papier-mâché, their faces look dull without any expression and sometimes strongly reminded me of the face animations in Morrowind (XBox 1). The movement animations of the NPCs is looking terrible, stiff and dead like a dried fish at the wall.

No, the AI isn't clever and this screenshot is lying... at least the lighting effects are nice

The lighting is very good, I’ll give them this much, and combined with the shadows it sometimes can make a scene look good (especially outside), but generally this game doesn’t look like a current-gen game, sometimes it’s looking more like a comic. I played the game on a HDTV on 1080i and then I would call the graphics ‘functional’ at best, it looks worse on 720p because it gets much rougher and much more blurry and it looks downright bad on any SDTV. That’s especially true for the multiplayer part, where it is sometimes really hard to see an enemy because of the graphics. The game has considerable tearing, so if you can’t stand that in a game, you’ll have a hard time playing it. Homefront uses a modified Unreal Engine 3 and the modification is mainly about the lighting, which looks great sometimes as I mentioned already. But otherwise the game seems to be not really running in High-Res and often has texture pop-ups and frame rate issues. Usually games run smoother when you install them on the 360 HDD, but Homefront doesn’t get better after the installation, alas.

Apologetics say it’s “because of the Unreal Engine and all”, and that you can’t expect very good graphics with the maps being huge etc.. but that’s nonsense. First of all, the maps in the single player campaign are not that large and even the maps in the Multiplayer are not really large. Many other games like Bulletstorm, Batman: Arkham Assylum or Gears of War also use the Unreal Engine and they look fantastic, so it’s certainly not the engines’ fault nor the Xbox 360′s fault, because look at Crysis 2 and see what can be done!

In one scene in Homefront, you enter a room with three guys who are looking at a map to plan some mission or something like that, and when you get a closer look at the map and see a texture with a white, a black and a green blur on it to portray a map, then you know the mission they plan with that map can only fail…

Audio

The music in the game is quite nice and especially the opening music in the multiplayer lobby is kinda cool and I like it. The weapons sound very good and you can hear the punch an assault rifle is able to deliver. The effects in firefights or when you drive a vehicle are good.

But otherwise, the game has a completely screwed up audio setting, it makes you ask yourself why the hell did you pay for a 5.1 system? I didn’t realize it at first, but after some time playing the game it became obvious that there’s always a voice beside you, no matter where the speaker is actually standing. So if you – or rather the other way round, because as I said you can’t talk – well, ok then, if someone is talking to you, then you will hear the voice and you will hear it according to his direction as it should be. But this surround effect is strangely mild and it’s not that easy to tell where exactly the speaker is standing. But it gets weird when the speaker is walking away from you and he is still as loud as before when he was standing right next to you. This can become really silly in larger areas, you’ll always hear everything as if it was spoken next to you even if spoken at the other side of the map. And no, they don’t talk by radio. In the sniper mission, you might explain it as talking by radio in your ear etc. but it simply is screwed up audio, that’s all. How that could make it through the quality checking is beyond me. It’s of course also killing any immersion that may have been left in the game.

Multiplayer

Considering all the mistakes the games makes and the bad design approach and the technical problems and flaws and such, it would score with a solid 2 out 10 for me. It feels rushed out and incomplete. Luckily the game has a multiplayer, something every shooter must have these days and when a studio is talking about working on a ‘CoD killer’, they usually don’t aim at the single player experience but at the multiplayer. The multiplayer is where most action will taken place, where it is decided whether a game will last for a longer time or be back on eBay after the first play-through.

Provides a good overview: when you die, the camera zooms from high above into the battlefield

KAOS Studios started as Trauma Studios when they developed the Desert Combat mod for the game Battlefield 1942 and later were also working on the Battlefield series under direction of DICE. They then were hired by THQ to work on FPS games and under the new name KAOS developed the Xbox 360 game Frontlines: Fuel of War. So they have some experience when it comes to online multiplayer in shooters and Homefront here actually is able to show what the designers can do. It’s not without problems and it’s far from being the holy grail of online shooters, but the good points outweigh the flaws here.

The multiplayer setting is same as in the single player campaign, so you have two sides, the Korean soldiers and – no, not the Resistance but – the US Army fighting each other in the hometowns of the United States. Therefore the multiplayer setting is portraying the time when the invasion starts and so takes place before the single player campaign of the game. It’s nice to play before and after the occupation, but sometimes while playing the multiplayer, I thought about possible interesting new modes when the multiplayer setting would be the same as in the campaign. Playing as either Resistance, US Military, or Korean occupants in a possible three sides scenario could have been cool, if done right.

Anyway, you have two sides in the MP part of the game and it consists of 2 modes further differentiated though into certain sub-modes. The main modes are the standard Team Deathmatch with 12 vs 12 players and then a 16 vs 16 player Ground Control mode, which is  similar to the Battlefield Conquest mode. These basic modes can be played in their standard form, or in Skirmish mode, which is Team Deathmatch and Ground Control with just 8 vs 8 players. The most innovative and interesting feature of the multiplayer, though, is the Battle Commander mode, which again can be played as TDM or GC, but you have to rank up to level 7 before it becomes available.

Battle Commander

In the Battle Commander mode, each side is fighting under the command of an AI commander who is watching the battle and who will make out specific targets in the course of the match. Players revceive stars and a sort of in-match promotion by their own Battle Commander when they start to eliminate enemies and manage to stay alive. Think of it as a form of “in-match only” killstreaks: the more enemy players you eliminate while staying alive, the more stars you get (ranking from 1 to 5 stars). With each star, your Battle Commander will give you some nice abilities, e.g. more damage, more health, something useful to keep his best soldier alive as long as possible. On the other side, the enemy Battle Commander will also see that someone is doing great in the enemy team and will give out orders to individual players on his side to eliminate this threat. The more stars a player on the opposing team earns, the more players will receive orders by their own Battle Commander to go and take him out. He will mark an area on the map which is roughly the area the enemy star-soldier is currently located in and then every player who got such an order is able to search that player and try to get him down. If someone manages to do so, then this player will receive a good amount of Battle Points as a reward, which then can be spent on weapons, equipment or technical stuff such like drones, or vehicles.

A cool idea which adds an interesting side-objective: The Battle Commander

So, this is an interesting way to keep the matches fresh because any time you can receive an individual order which is then your personal side-mission in the overall battle and if you are able to eliminate the player (you will be given the name of that player which makes it more personal and spices things up), you have the advantage of getting more Battle Points than by just fighting the usual fight. Since the matches can be over in 7-10 minutes, it’s essential to get as much Battle Points as possible to have a wider range of tools and equipment at your disposal.

The Battle Commander will also deny snipers the lame option of spawn-killing or at least will make it much more difficult for them to keep doing it. First, campers generally have a harder time in the BC mode because (although they will certainly rank up quite fast by accumulating stars), with 4 or 5 stars on their head they will have to fight against the whole opposing team because the enemy battle commander will give every single soldier on his side the order to take that threat out ASAP. If the Battle Commander is recognizing that a camper is actually spawn killing players, then this player won’t get any points from these kills and is marked as a target immediately for all and hopefully taken out fast.

Generally the Battle Commander works great and the modes where this feature is turned on are more fun than the standard TDM and GC, so I usually play them. The other side of the coin is that it becomes a bit unrealistic because you often feel like running around with a big ‘Here! Shoot me first‘ marker on your back the better you become and there’s less and less opportunity to seek cover and hide yourself.

Calling in an airstrike feels cooool... but if 10 players have the same idea, it becomes quite annoying

Personally I don’t have a problem with camping because I think it’s a realistic tactic to not run around like a headless chicken always guns ablaze, simply because everybody in a real battle would try to stay alive and not take any unnecessary risks. Spawn Killing is a no-go, of course, so here HF is going into the right direction by just not counting any kills made that way. Shooters should generally limit the number of snipers in matches because camping only becomes a problem when a sniper is camping, since he can be so far away that you are dead before are able to get to him. Or make the sniper an option in the killstreak process, so that a good player can choose to become one for a limited time. There are ways to counter the sniper-camping problem, but it would generally be a good idea not to allow the kiddies their favorite class just from start, so that this class has to be earned by mature, successful playing first.

Being the target of the other sides’ Battle Commander makes the game all the more thrilling because you know everybody step by step gets to know your name now and is told that you are a threat worth of being taken out fast, great for boosting your gamer ego

Battle Points

The use of Battle Points is another innovative feature of HF in all MP modes of the game. It’s a form of in-match currency like the CoD points in Blops, but while you can use the CoD points to create your class and buy the weapons you like instead of unlocking and auto-buying them by ranking up, in HF this currency is only available to you in the current match. You rank up normally and get new weapons and attachments by doing so, but Battle Points have nothing to do with that. In the Armory you create your class setup and choose what stuff you want in your ‘slots’ (this can be a Rocket Launcher, a drone, a flak jacket and so on).

You customize your classes between matches and "unlock" your equipment by spending Battle Points during the match

Then, when you start the game, you collect BPs by killing enemies or – in GC – by conquering specific areas on the map. What you have earned in a given match,  you can spend on the stuff you assigned to your slots. So, say when you want to be able to defend against tanks in the match, you may assign a RPG launcher to one of your available slots and when you are in the game, you can immediately ‘buy’ such a weapon by just pressing the d-pad to activate that slot. An RPG launcher costs 250 BPs and as long as you have enough money, you can buy that weapon again and again (but when you die, your weapon is gone and you have to buy a new one).

Things get interesting because of a tactical decision which is added to the matches now. Do I collect enough BPs so I’m able to ‘buy’ an expensive Tank or an Apache Helicopter later in the game? Or do I use more cheap stuff like drones and weapons? Vehicles are costly and you first need to rank up to get access to customizable vehicle loadouts, but after that you can choose to spawn in that vehicle when you got shot, which eliminates the Battlefield problem of ‘whoever gets first to the vehicle spawn point, can use it’, since you directly spawn in the chosen vehicle – you paid for it, after all! Team mates can then join you for free if a vehicle still has seats available. Nice, but there’s always a ‘but’…

Although it works well so far, this also has a negative side. Since any vehicle is open to all team members, you cannot be sure to operate a tank with your party members and friends because in the time you need to get to them, the open seat is taken by another team mate already who just has to press the button when it’s their time to spawn back on the battlefield. Furthermore, because these vehicles are so costly, you have to wait and collect enough BPs first before you can use them to buy the vehicle of your choice. The game can be almost over by the time you can afford that mighty M1A3 Abrams tank for 2000 BPs, which means you won’t be using any weapon or drone before in the match because you are collecting money for the tank… and then you can drive around for 6 seconds before the game ends is – and that is, well, not much fun. So although HF has vehicles in the MP, it’s not as much fun for those who like to mainly use vehicles or to train themselves as tank drivers or pilots as it is e.g. in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Generally, the idea is that everybody is an infantryman and later on when people start getting enough BPs, the battle escalates as more and more heavy vehicles, helis and such appear on the map. A match certainly gets more intense then. So far that seems to work more in theory than in the real matches because of the above mentioned problem of the matches being over quite fast.

Spawning in an airstrike isn't very entertaining

Since you can also buy airstrikes, like hellfire rockets, white phosphor, cluster bombs etc. this also can be a bit annoying. The maps are large, that’s true, at least larger as those in the infantry-centric CoD games, but not so large that constant airstrikes won’t ruin your day. We often thought while playing HF we were playing CoD: Modern Warfare 2 because we had this deja vu of too much happening too often above our heads.

Airstrikes are problematic because of mainly two things in combination with the not large enough areas:
1. the kills you make with such airstrikes lead to ‘stacking’ rewards, which means the BPs you get through an airstrike are directly available again. Since airstrikes can kill many players at once, it means there’s a chance to keep these airstrikes rolling in one after another while the players on the ground can’t do much about it and get killed, often spawn killed by that. Not fun!
2. In a match where a lot of players chose an airstrike in their slots, these will become available for most if not all of them roughly at the same time (given they are good enough to get the BPs together). If so, you will constantly hear the warning ‘Enemy airstrike coming in’ and you’ll get killed again and again, because it’s simply too much, which can be quite annoying.

Maps & Gameplay

The maps in HF are a bit disappointing because they all look and feel quite the same and there are not that many (8, in fact). Granted, that’s more than we got in Bad Company 2, but there the maps always looked quite differently in the course of a battle due to the destruction feature of the engine. In Homefront, the maps don’t change their appearance.  It’s always a town area of some sort and you quickly get the feeling of been there done that. There’s always the obligatory Donut, silo, and town church. Certainly the US have many small and even bigger towns, but there are woods, too, and I heard sometimes you will even be able to discover snow somewhere… so there are plenty of options to design maps that don’t look all like the same town just from different angles. The problems because of the lack of penetration and destruction were already mentioned, so beware if you see someone prone on the rooftop of a building or crouching behind a fence or even standing behind mashed wire – many times the game won’t let a hit count as a hit, although you clearly had him in sight when taken the shot.

Extremely annoying is the map limitation which will get you killed within 5 seconds by the Hand of God. The areas on the maps that can be used depend on the mode you play, but each map is always a restricted area and there are certain places where you are allowed to go – and where you are not. You can see the invisible (but passable!) map border on the mini-map as a red area and if you cross the line and walk into that red district, a warning message will appear on your screen telling you that you have 5 seconds to return to the battlefield. 5 seconds are not a long time and it’s not always clear where you are going right now in the heat of battle. If you are fighting close to the border, it can easily happen that you find yourself confronted with that message counting down from 5 to 0 simply because you hadn’t the time to look at the mini-map.

This official artwork looks dramatic. Unfortunately, the campaign isn't.

Or there was no other way out of the situation, three enemies in front of you and you tried to get out of there and the way to escape appeared to be clear and open and all, but unfortunately not legal to use, so you are dead. Sometimes you simply slip down a roof or slope and can’t control where you are going, and if you happen to land in the red zone and you can’t get to legal terrain in 5 secs… you are dead. That’s not fun and just lame. KAOS, either allow the players to use the whole map or – if you don’t want that – make the part you don’t want to have players running around in inaccessible. If I can’t reach it, I can’t go there, it’s that simple. But to have a legal area and a likewise open but illegal area, and then to simply penalize the player with instant death if he finds himself in the wrong part of the map, is just lame.

There are also certain points that can be reached through the red zone in 5 secs and when you are there it is considered legal by the game because you are in a small sweet spot that happens to be just inside the legal area again. Sometimes you can shoot from such a spot into the legal area and if players don’t know that spot, they first will have to fight the red-area-timer before they are able to reach you and get you down, so plenty of time for you to kill them. It’s not as glitchy as being completely under the map, but it comes very close.

Not actually a problem of the maps as such, but a problem nonetheless and only relevant in the multiplayer maps, are the player names  hovering on top of the other players. That’s something I don’t like at all because it’s actually hindering your LOS and therefore making the game more difficult than it should be. Every player has their name hovering above the head in either green or red, depending on the side the player is currently belonging to (friendly/enemy) and gamer names can often be quite long. Add to that a possible clan tag (a feature that the game allows after you reach to a certain rank) and this text can become really long. Now imagine several players running around in the same area, defending a position or attacking the enemy, and all you see is this text wall on your screen. It always depends on the range and at a certain closer range, the text does disappear, but it still can be a major drawback that you can’t really see what’s going on.

Your name is also always visible from afar for the enemies, so keep in mind that you always have your name in red letters above your head. Lying prone in a good position is kinda pointless when the enemy can see you like a lighted Christmas tree and just has to aim a bit under your name to hit you, even if he can’t see you directly. There’s no hardcore mode in Homefront‘s MP that would address this problem and there’s no possibility to change the player names in any form. In CoD: Black Ops for example you can choose how you want the player names to be portrayed, in full length or abbreviated and this helps a lot in circumventing this text wall problem.

The MP is not really suited for a slow tactical approach because there’s much going on around you and especially above you, you get marked in the BC modes, your name is visible to the enemies and one shot or burst weapons like the M16 or Scar (you have to work with what you get, you can’t switch between single-shot and auto-fire) are neither fish nor meat in combat, because you won’t see the snipers in long range engagements before they see you and in QCB you are dead when someone with a SMG comes round the corner. You have to be patient if you want to rack up some points with an assault rile and later I found it much easier to just also grab a SMG and run and gun through the maps as most people seem to do. You will get much more kills this way, that means you’ll earn much more BPs and that means you can quicker use vehicles and/or airstrikes to make even more in-game money.

The sound in MP matches is good and has enough Omph! for effects, weapons and vehicles. The in-game characters speak automatically and give out warnings and ask for cover when reloading, so the atmosphere is good and the information you get from this auto-speak feature is accurate. Unfortunately, it has the same weird effect as in the SP – you will always hear folks speaking right next to you even if no one is actually near you. It’s not as confusing as in the SP because the heat of battle in MP will seldom allow you to look around to see who’s speaking to you, but the audio is problematic in the game, that’s a fact.

Vehicles feel good, there’s nothing more disappointing than driving a heavy battle tank that drives like an empty shoe box (like it was in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, where vehicles didn’t seem to have any weight) but in Homefront each vehicle has the right feel and weight and it’s great fun to use them. Unfortunately the console versions of the game don’t have the first person-view for vehicles, so there’s no cockpit in the Apache, or a gunner view in a tank. That really affects the atmosphere when using vehicles, since I like to have the inside view even if I can’t see as much as in the third person view, it just feels more authentic to me. The PC version does have these views and the SP of the console versions also has a cockpit view when you fly the helicopter, so I see no reason to not have this in MP too – other than to give the PC folks more features. Anyway, one can adapt to that and the controls are good for all vehicles.

Server Problems

That said the MP is fun, although it has its problems, but one can adapt to all that and enjoy the matches. At least if you are able to join the game in the first place. Homefront has pretty severe server connection issues and since the game is out and this is for weeks now it’s unacceptable that you have to be lucky to join a game at all. I usually get the ‘beacon not found’ error which can be circumvented by restarting the game. But it doesn’t always work and even if it does it’s certainly not how I want to play my games on Xbox Live, which is a service I pay for. The game uses a battle code which is a code you find in a new bought game and after entering the code online you are able to play the multiplayer. If you don’t own the code you can only play up to rank 5, so if you buy the game second hand, you have to pay for that code to play it online as it is meant to be played. Imagine you do that and then you simply can’t play it because the severs don’t work properly. Not fun!

Even burning Koreans get old after the 100th explosion...

I even got booted from the server in the middle of a match several times and now had two days where I was not able to join a game at all. Two weeks or what after a game is on the market and not being able to join at all for days… that’s not how you will beat CoD or Battlefield, KAOS, surely not. A patch has been announced and certainly that’s what they have to do, but I suppose many people have already sold the game before the patch is available and moved on to next – hopefully better – game. As I said in the introduction, this year is the big clash of shooters and games that have such problems won’t be considered worth playing and will end up as the usual wasteland online.

Update: The game was recently patched and the connection issues appear to be resolved, at least in my experience matchmaking isn’t as problematic as it was during the first weeks. Although many people still complain about problems when trying to join games as a party and say that they still get kicked in the middle of a match quite often.

Another server issue which hasn’t been fixed yet: THQ uses dedicated servers for Homefront (which is of course a good thing, as we all know the problems with bad connections in the CoD style peer-to-peer mode games), but we often have yellow and even red dots in the lobby, which means we are far away from such servers. KAOS, if you are not able or willing to have servers for your games in all countries and enough that everybody can find a server to which they can connect in a way that the connection is green = good, then you can as well use the peer-to-peer connection, since it makes the whole dedicated server thing pointless.

Conclusion

So, what we have here is a shooter that simply fails in the story driven single player campaign – despite the lead level designer’s announcements that KAOS studio wanted the game to “be story-centric and that the narrative is focus here”. They wanted to give us real emotions and they did – in perhaps three scenes of the game, and for me the only emotion the game is able to evoke on a regular base and which it keeps at a high level, is boredom. The story is of course nonsense, but that goes for many (if not all) other shooters out there, so if you take your silly story and at least present it kickass-like and in a convincing way, all is fine. And that was what I was actually expecting. Fighting occupants in the USA, being a civilian and not a top-secret-SpecOps or Masterchief-Supersoldier, fighting in an American small town, not assaulting the beaches of Normandy etc. – this would have been kinda new and this was your chance, KAOS. You blew it by making the story as a whole a lot less than what any of the bits of it seemed to promise gameplay-wise.

What about the emotional connection? I see Korean soldiers kill the parents of a small child on the streets and then walking away. I see them torturing civilians, I see civilians getting shot in the streets. All this in the first minutes of the game. Fine, the stage is set, these are evil guys and I don’t want to let happen what they do. Are there more who don’t want to let that happen? Where are they? Can I be of any help? Do they have a story? Can I talk with them? Nothing of this is of any interest in the game. So the  overly simplistic “see a cruel scene -> get emotional ->do some average shooting ->see another cruel scene ->play some more shooting now with a bit more emotion ->see another cruel scene -> fight on, don’t lose your emotional reaction ->end fight -> see credits” strategy didn’t work.

What did KAOS think? Is that what they learned from the CoD series they tried to copy so desperately? If so, then go back and play MW1 and 2 again to see what you did wrong. The opportunity was there to use a fresh story and a new perspective, to make a really good game and to establish a new shooter franchise.

Very convincing: the average US citizen controls an ass-kicking Goliath

They talked about the next Homefront perhaps taking place in London… sure why not? If you are able to create a background that is interesting and allows for a wider perspective, then of course sequels could expand on that, I could even imagine a Homefront in Berlin. The Korean army occupying the USA and later even Europe, there’s some story on a global scale and a real game in there, but you have to do it right. The first game should have been the base for that possible future expansion of the scenario and that means I was expecting something more than just the average shooter, and to say the truth the campaign with all the bland missions, the outdated gfx, the bad AI and audio and all is not even average.

KAOS announced that they “were ready to play with the Big Guys now” and I hoped that this would be true, because the more good shooter franchises out there, the better for all of us and it’s no secret that the shooter genre is not really moving forward with all the sequels of well established franchises, innovation is lacking and KAOS had that chance right in their hands – and threw it out of the window with an ugly looking  ‘poor man’s CoD‘ game.

The multiplayer surely is the best part of the game and everyone who likes military shooters like Battlefield with good weapons and vehicles and some future twist like the drones and all should definitely try it out, but these people should also save 5 hours of their life and not play the single player! Sit yourself on the couch with a bottle of Jacky and get drunk, that’s a better use of your time than to play this boring ‘dumbass follows orders in tight corridors of a game that looks bad and sounds weird and where he fights against even dumber AI’ campaign.

North Korea - a threatening super power!

Just in case that you seem to think that I’m losing patience with crappy game designs these days let me tell you… you are damn right. These games cost a lot of money and get shorter and shorter, you sometimes have to pay again if you buy them used and want to play online. The consoles are perhaps behind the PC regarding hardware and all, because they have a fixed hardware setting and are not meant for upgrades, all true, but they are extremely powerful compared to the previous generations of machines and so I don’t want to see graphics on Xbox 1 niveau anymore.Take a look at Crysis 2 and you know what’s still possible on the good old XBox 360!

I don’t want to play against extremely dumb AI, I want convincing combats. It can be done, it’s not a question of hardware power it’s a question of design approach and talent. Play some Halo or some GoW. And I don’t want the same game over and over just with a different title and from a different publisher. We have the CoD franchise, we know what this game series is known for and what is good and bad about it, so don’t simply copy that and then actually make a fool of yourself in failing to do so after a big hype that painted a larger-than-life picture for this ‘innovative new shooter’ that we can all expect.

If you have an idea, something that’s new, use it wisely and realize what you have there, an opportunity that might bring the whole genre out of the sequel-after-sequel-and-just-more-of-the-same-paralysis. You’ll need to take some risks, of course it can still go bust, but it also can become a huge success, see Borderlands. This game came out of nothing, was very well supported with good DLC, has nothing to do with CoD and is very innovative – and we all want to play more of it.

I can’t say that for Homefront, alas – fall out soldier!