Broken Arrow Vanguard Edition

I came into this one with the standard skepticism I bring to anything Slitherine puts AAA pricing on, and about three hours in I was still in the roster builder, arguing with myself about whether to run the M1A2 SEP v3 with Trophy Active Protection System or swap it for extra side armor. That choice matters, by the way. An Abrams without APS against a Russian player stacking Kornet ATGM teams is a very expensive bonfire. That level of pre-match decision-making is either going to hook you immediately or make you close the launcher. The core loop ditches base-building and resource mining entirely. You construct a deck before the match, choosing from over 300 units across six categories: recon, infantry, fighting vehicles, support, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. Each unit slot can be customized with different armament packages, armor configurations, and support systems, giving you over 1,500 possible combinations before you even touch the tactical map. Once in-game, reinforcements arrive on the battlefield directly rather than spawning from a production building, which keeps the pacing closer to World in Conflict than StarCraft. You earn points by eliminating enemies, recycling units you no longer need, and staying in the fight over time. Positioning, line of sight, and terrain do real work here. Urban environments favor infantry garrisons and ambushes; open ground kills anything without smoke or artillery cover. Airpower is devastating in the right hands but bleeds points fast if you mismanage fuel or fly into a SAM umbrella. The combined-arms puzzle clicks hard when it all lines up. There is a 19-mission campaign set in the Baltic region, playable from both US and Russian perspectives, running somewhere between 15 and 25 hours depending on skill level. The voice acting is flat and the writing is functional at best, but the scenario design is solid enough to teach you the unit roles before multiplayer throws you to the wolves. The absence of mid-mission saves is the single most complained-about feature in the whole game, and it is a legitimate problem on longer missions. Skirmish mode against AI runs across 19 maps based on real-world locations, and the scenario editor uses the same toolset the developers built the campaign with, which means the Workshop output is already diverse and growing. Multiplayer is where the real time investment lives, and it is also where the game has the most friction right now. Matches go up to 5v5, and when you have a coordinated team with complementary deck builds covering each other's gaps, it is the most interesting large-scale tactical RTS experience available on PC. The problems are real though: cheaters have been a persistent complaint since launch, leavers face no penalty so public lobbies can collapse mid-match, and as of mid-2026 queue times at higher ranks are stretching past 20 minutes. The vehicle meta has also been criticized for dominating too hard, with infantry feeling fragile and underdeveloped compared to the depth on the armor side. Faction balance sits around a 48-52% win rate which is impressive for an asymmetric game at this stage, but individual unit and specialization balance is still being sorted out. The developers are actively patching and a public test branch is in place for faster iteration, which is the right call. The roadmap through 2026 and into 2027 includes new specialization DLCs, a spectator mode nearing completion, and quality-of-life improvements that should have shipped at launch. For a shooter specialist like me, the netcode and input responsiveness matter even in an RTS context. On an RTX 4070-class card you will hold stable frames through most scenarios, with the worst dips appearing in chaotic late-game 5v5 pushes with aircraft and artillery overlapping. Install it on an SSD. Texture streaming on a spinning drive stutters visibly at high unit counts. The UI is functional but rough, and the lack of unit tooltips explaining role differences is a real problem for anyone who cannot identify the difference between three infantry squads all carrying tube-launched weapons. This is a game built for the Wargame and WARNO crowd first, everyone else second. If you are coming from that world, the learning curve is actually gentler than WARNO's 1,000-unit roster. If you are not from that world, budget some study time before your first multiplayer match.

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