Blitzkrieg is a real-time strategy/war game covering the ground war in Europe and Northern Africa during WWII. Similar to Sudden Strike, you fight as a commander for the German troops, the Soviet army, or the Allies in three large-scale military campaigns, one for each of the sides. Each campaign is divided into missions, and each mission is divided into several objectives. These objectives comprise things like taking a town, air-dropping a sniper behind enemy lines to assassinate a commander or even building a bridge with engineers to open an attack route.

Basically, Blitzkrieg is similar to Sudden Strike, though there are many little differences such as historical accuracy - shell penetration and armor values are based on actual characteristics, the weaponry your infantry follows a chronological timeline as the campaigns progress, and other. Blitzkrieg is also very well playable even for newcomers to this genre. There are some tutorial missions that allow you play the game easily. In addition, there is an in-game encyclopedia that will teach you about all of the units in the game. All the missions in Blitzkrieg are historically accurate. That means, the war will progress the way that the real war did, and nothing that you can do will change that. Fortunately, there are a few benefits to this unique way of playing, one of them is a truly unlimited number of random maps. You can play 16 missions and finish a campaign or play a hundred (or more missions) to finish the same campaign - each time the experience will be different, the second is that for each random mission your units and troops gain experience and upgraded weaponry to carry forward into the next missions. Probably the biggest differences between Blitzkrieg and most of the real-time strategy titles on the shelves are that you don't build units - you fight with what you have and what you're reinforced with, just like in reality. It may sound horrible at first, but a lot of it is common sense and it doesn't take long to realize that it's actually a lot of fun.

Blitzkrieg features 3 campaigns with 21 main and ~ approx. 60 submissions with 3 difficulty levels, plus an infinite number of optional sub-missions, historically accurate battles of World War II in Africa, Russia and Europe, 3D vehicles with realistic weapon and armor data, large operations involving hundreds of Russian, German and Allied units, over 200 types of vehicles and machinery including tanks, artillery, rocket launchers, APC's, jeeps and aircraft, 40 kinds of infantry (officers, snipers, machine gunners, tank busters, SMG-equipped privates, riflemen, gunners, field engineers), units can advance their ranks, 250 types of buildings and objects, destructible landscape objects, multiplayer game via LAN or the Internet, random map generator, skirmish mode, ability to build bridges, dig trenches, lay mines and call for air support (fighter, bomber, low level fighter, recon, paratrooper), ability to generate missions, maps, textures as well as models and add sounds.

There are a host of other RTS war games on the market that pride themselves on historical accuracy. Blitzkrieg finally does have that. If you truly enjoy World War II RTS genre and would like a good challenge, you should get this game. For more information, visit Blitzkrieg homepage and download and try this playable demo (96MB). Blitzkrieg is already available in Germany and due for release elsewhere later in the summer (according to CDV, UK Release will be May 15th).

System requirements:
Minimum: Pentium II 366 MHz, 64 MB RAM, AGP Graphic 3D accelerator Riva TNT class, 8MB video RAM, Monitor supporting 1024x768 resolution, 4x CD-ROM, Sound adapter, 2150 MB HDD free. + about 500 MB for Windows swap file and save games.

Recommended: Pentium III 800 MHz, 128 MB RAM, AGP 4x Graphics 3D accelerator GeForce DDR class, 32MB video RAM, Monitor supporting 1024x768 resolution, 32x CD-ROM, Sound adapter, 2150 MB HDD free. + about 500 MB for Windows swap file and save games.