Headquarters: Cold War

I came into Headquarters: Cold War expecting a lazy reskin of Starni Games' World War II predecessor, and the community's early split reaction made that suspicion louder. Having sat with the campaigns properly, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The engine is familiar - sometimes uncomfortably so - but the 1984 setting pulls enough weight to make the whole thing feel like a distinct experience rather than a palette swap. The core loop is turn-based squad tactics on square grids. You are managing small, named units across mixed open and urban terrain, calling in artillery and airstrikes as cooldown-gated abilities, and - this is the part that actually bites you - keeping your recon elements alive. Scouting is not optional flavoring here; it is the mechanical spine of every engagement. Push a T-62 column down a highway without first clearing the flanks and you will find out, quickly, what a NATO ambush feels like. The crew damage system makes losses feel permanent in a satisfying way: lose a gunner and your firepower drops, lose a driver and that tank is going nowhere fast. Between missions you assign hero skills from three skill trees and bring in replacements, which creates just enough of a campaign momentum to keep you invested across all twenty operations. The unit roster across both the NATO and USSR campaigns is where the game earns its keep. Fifty-eight distinct units, including the Mi-24 Hind and the UH-60 Black Hawk, gives each side a genuinely different feel on the field. The helicopters are fragile and faster than anything else on the map, useful for rapid reconnaissance and surgical strikes - but one well-placed ambush and your visibility collapses for the rest of the battle. Critics have rightly noted that helicopters do not reshape battles as dramatically as the marketing implies, but they do add a real layer of risk management that the World War II title lacked. Armor facing matters too: front, side, back, and top are modeled separately, so flanking is a genuine tactical option rather than a stat bonus. The rough edges are real and the community flagged them early. The AI in skirmish mode has been called out as underpowered, which makes custom and player-made maps considerably less threatening than the handcrafted campaign missions. Some weapon sounds were reportedly carried over from the previous game, which undercuts immersion when your Cold War-era hardware sounds like 1944. The tutorial drew complaints for complexity and poor pacing, and at least one player could not get past it at launch. That is a fixable problem, but it is a bad first impression. The multiplayer hooks - 2v2 co-op and asynchronous PBEM play through Slitherine's CombatHQ system - are solid on paper, but concurrent player counts are low enough that finding a live match takes effort. If you are buying this primarily for online PvP, manage expectations accordingly. For the solo-focused crowd who wants a tight, approachable wargame that does not ask you to track logistics chains or read a manual the size of a novel, this delivers. The two campaigns are well-structured and designed to keep surprising you - enemy capabilities shift mission to mission and the narrative, while not cinematic, gives each operation enough context to feel purposeful. The built-in map editor adds a long shelf-life for anyone willing to put in the creative work. Just go in knowing this is an iterative step from the WWII title, not a generational leap, and your enjoyment will calibrate correctly.

Fred · Scout Team

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