military and historical

Well i have to admit, when i played the demo of blitzkrieg i was already hooked.
I'm new to real time strategy games, i'm a turn baser of old!
For your info i'm running a P4 2.4 gig, 256 ram, with a 64 meg graphics card, and i had absolutley no trouble running this game, no hiccups.
Untill i played the demo i was hooked on panzer general 3d and scorched earth, those WERE my bread and butter games.
This game is great!
If i gave this game a 5 star rating then it would have to be perfect and its not.
But its damn near close.
As other reviewers mentioned, it gets kind of tedious when you have to supply your vehicles, and you are kind of vulnerable when you do this unless you have your area very well secured, i guess i had to get used to the idea of enemy units attacking me at a moments notice, DEFEND DEFEND DEFEND!
What i really like about this game is when you are deploying "artillery for example" and you actually see the guys picking and packing up the guns, seeing the arms on the guns swing open and deploy, never had anything like that in panzer general, that alone is really neat!
I'm a bit of a WWII amature armour history buff so i really get a great deal of joy to see that the damage is realistic, for example i have this other game a WWll tank simulator, and in that game, "if your playing as the germans" is very disheartening to have your panther or tiger1 shot to peices by a ordinary sherman tank at 2000 yards!
That just did'nt happen, so i'm happy that this game uses realistic damage in it.
I just wish i could figure out how to delete my old saved games, but other than that i would highly reccomend this game to anyone.
The learning curve is a little steep only because you need to learn what tanks and guns can do what and what they can't do, but there is a section where you can look at all the units in this game to help you with that.
I am very happy i bought this game!

I got my hands on the German version by chance and I already finished the game. I'm impressed.

Graphically the game is well-done. The tanks look like their real-live counterparts (the creators of the game visited the Moscow museum and made sure that all the tanks in the game are as big as, colored as, etc as the exhibits there). Infantry ducks and aims when shooting with a rifle. Airplanes dive, strafe and carpet bomb. Everything is beautifully done, and yet the engine is quite light. The game will run well even on older computers.

The gameplay is very, very fun. The game is incredibly realistic without becoming boring. The player is forced to combine all the WW2 weapons by the game itself - without softening the enemy defenses with artillery and airplanes it is hard to mount a succesful offensive. Attacking with tanks only is generally a bad idea since 3-4 well camouflaged AT guns (especially monstrosities like the German Flak88) can stop 10+ tanks easily. Thus the player is forced to combine tanks with infantry (comfortably enough one can make the infantry climb on the top of the tank and thus transport them) since infantry fares quite well against AT guns.
Furthermore there are trenches, which are quite effective at stopping tanks since the infantry inside is reasonably well protected against them. If the tanks try to roll over the trench the infantry usually manages to break their tracks thus rendering them immobile. All this is done very easily in the game because of the intuitive and simple interface.
All the major engines of destruction of WW2 are present in the game - starting from the Panzer 3, Mathilda and BT tanks, going through the Panzer 4, Sherman and T-34 and ending up with the fearsome Pershings, Tigers and IS-2. There are even some tanks not used in the war - the Russian IS-3 (it started for the front in May '45) and the German Super Heavy Maus (which never went beyond a prototype). This is just the tanks - there's also Messerschimdts, Stukas, IL-2s, Yaks, Spitfires, Liberators and what not.

A note on the way damage is calculated. Each unit in the game (though it matters mostly for tanks only) has front, back, sides and top armor. When a gun is fired, if the target is hit the game makes a check whether or not the armor is penetrated. If not the target suffers no damage. This makes the combat very realistic. One can really feel the power of say the Russian IS-2 tank with its 122 mm gun when it wastes a Tiger in one shot. One feels fear when he see the German Elefant going against 5 tanks and wasting them with one shot each without getting more than a few scratches - simply because it's armor is so thick mere 75mm guns can't penetrate it.

A few words on the campaign structure - it consists of 'chapters'. Each chapter has some random missions (at least one must be played) and a historical mission. The random missions are randomly generated missions where you have only your 'core' units available. These core units are tank/artillery crews that can advance in experience as your campaign progresses. You can upgrade them. For example my tank crew, commanded by Sergeant Shoholov started with a meager T-27 light tank in Finland '39 and proudly assaulted Berlin in a brand new IS-2 titan.
The Historical missions are, well, historical missions. One good thing I noticed is that there is pretty much no historical inaccuracy. For example in Poland the German army hardly has any Panzer 4s while in the '42 missions (Kharkov) they have mostly Panzer 4s. Same with the infantry - in the beggining almost all infantrymen are armed with rifles. Towards the end there are SMGs, MGs, AT rifles, Bazookas and what not.

Multiplayer is fun too. There's flag-match and assault. In assault one side defends and the other attacks (no reinforcements available) while in flag-match the side with more flags gets more reinforcements. I tried it, it's fun. Some more maps would be good though.

In conclusion I'll note that the version I played is 1.00. The English language release will be version 1.01. I believe that it comes out somewhere in the middle of May.
This is a very good and stable RTS game, much superior to Command&Conquer generals (for example) which I would recommend to anyone interested in the genre or in WW2 in general.

This game is pretty decent. When I first played it, I unistalled the game after playing it for about 10 minutes because it was impossible for me to beat the first few missions. It is very different from other RTS games such as Starcraft, Warcraft, and Age of Empires. Unlike those RTS games this games this game is not simple and it might take a while to get better or get used to the gameplay. I have only played it about a month now so I am still a noob at this game but single player is still pretty fun. The first thing that reminded of me was the Combat Mission games which made me think that Blitzkrieg was more of a TBS game than RTS. It is RTS, however, it is very similar to Combat Mission if you played it before. The units move slowly in groups and the setting is in WWII. Also, the sound is very realistic.

The requirements is one thing that you don't have to worry about. If you have read all my reviews, you know that I own whole mess of PCs. But instead of using my newer PCs, I used the oldest PC that I had for about 4 years which the system specifications are Celeron 900mhz, 256mb ram, GeForce 2 and ran it on 1024x768x32, a medium resolution, without any slowdowns. So, any people can play this game with a dated PC which shouldn't go below Pentium 2 400mhz, 128mb ram, and 16mb video card. It is not the official requirements but my requirements are little higher which will make the game run a little better.

If you are a quick learner or if you have played all types of RTS and TBS games, this game is definitly for you. Also if you are a WWII buff, this game might be also for you. But if you aren't satisfied with my review, then it is safer bet that you try the demo from fileplanet.com, gamershell.com, or filefront.com.