As I have already made clear on this website, there are few things I love more in video games than moving guys around a map. Today, I would like to pay tribute to my favourite entry in the MGAM genre: Order of Battle, a turn-based WW2 tactics game first released in 2015.
Order of Battle is basically a more modern version of the classic Panzer General. With hex maps, turn-based gameplay and a probability-based resolution to battles, it basically plays the same as a round of Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, only you have Sherman tanks and paratroopers instead of wizards and hero characters.
I will say here that, before we go any further, this game has problems. For one, not long after launch it adopted what was at the time a fairly controversial release model where the base game (including a simple tutorial) was free, and players were then asked to buy each campaign individually. That’s pretty normal by 2025 standards, but back then it pissed a lot of people off!
It also suffers from the same problem a lot of Second World War games do in that in trying to give you access to multiple factions–you can play scripted campaigns as both the Germans and Japanese–they end up inadvertently putting the player in charge of stuff like…genocides and the advances that led to the Rape of Nanking. Things here are nowhere near as glib as they are in, say, Panzer Corps 2, which almost revels in it, but it’s still uncomfortable to be so focused on moving little guys around a map when what came after those guys, even if the game never mentions it, was a holocaust.
(Given the purchasing model mentioned above though, you absolutely never have to play those campaigns, and there are loads available, including the most interesting ones, for the Americans and British.)
Even as a game, it has issues! A big part of Order of Battle, and one of the things that separates it from Panzer General, is that it includes both a visible frontline (which ebbs and flows depending where each of your units is on the map), and the ability to sever your opponent’s supply lines by cutting across theirs, which can slow units down and even starve them of ammo, making them easier to mop up. It sounds great in theory–and is something the rival Unity of Command series is actually able to do well–but its implementation in OoB is maddening, because it allows a single unit to cut off an entire army’s supply lines, across thousands of miles of frontline, which is just some bullshit both from an authenticity standpoint as well as gameplay one.
All of which is to say that I love this game so much I do not really care about any of those things, at least not enough to stop me enjoying the game, because something Order of Battle does very well is let you move guys around a map. It excels at it. Everything about it is perfect. The way you can snap between selected units, the speed at which you can make them move, the little vrooms or marching boot sounds as they zoom off down a road, the way you can get a guy moving then click on the next guy and start him moving while the last guy is still moving, creating an endless succession of guys moving across the map all at once, it’s wonderful.
Order of Battle gives you the tangible thrill of being in command without any of the responsibility. Look at all these guys go! It doesn’t matter if they stumble into an ambush, that’s life, the point is that it was fun getting them there in the first place. You don’t have to write letters to grieving mothers back home, and even if you did, their sons died doing what they did best: moving six hexes straight into enemy crossfire because their commander was too bust enjoying the cute noises they made while doing it.
What’s also cool in Order of Battle is the sheer scale and variety of maps you get to move across. Ignoring the German and Japanese campaigns, there are still so many different ways you can fight this war as the British, Americans and Soviet Union, from the deserts of Africa to the snowy wastelands of Finland to the jungles of Burma. Each of those locations has different types of map, with different climates and different sizes. There are defensive maps, which are the worst, because they involve the least amount of moving guys around. There are dense urban struggles, vast open steppes that your tanks can soar across and, best of all, some big naval invasion maps which let you move ships, then have some of those ships turn into guys, then you get to move those guys around on land.
I don’t want to discredit the rest of the game here (even if this isn’t a review, I’ve done that already), as Order of Battle also has a neat experience system where your units can grow and improve (and be upgraded with better gear) throughout a campaign, and many missions feature some wild attempts at scripting, some of which works magnificently, others which…well, they tried. Campaigns are a pleasure to play through on a tactical basis, not just a vroom vroom basis, and for all the times this game stumbles I admire the way it’s able to pick itself up again and keep going given it was developed with what appear to be quite limited resources.
But yeah, for everything it does well, there’s nothing it does better than letting me move guys around a map. So thank you, Order of Battle, for being the best in the MGAM business.
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