Making History II: The War of the World

My spreadsheet instincts told me to be skeptical the moment I read the Metacritic score, but the actual story of Making History II is more complicated than a 38 suggests. The game shipped in a genuinely rough state in 2010, and most professional reviews captured that buggy launch window. What they largely missed is that Muzzy Lane spent the following six months patching aggressively, and the player community on Steam has since settled at a notably warmer verdict. The current build is a different animal from the one critics panned at release, though the foundational design limitations remain intact. The core structure is turn-based grand strategy across a map of over 1,000 land and sea regions, with each turn representing one week of real time. You plot your moves, then watch them resolve simultaneously against every other nation on the globe. City management lets you queue factories, research facilities, munitions plants, and radar arrays. The five-resource economy, built around money, oil, steel, food, and coal, generates genuine tension between industrial expansion and military spending. The technology tree evolves your units from biplanes and WWI-era tanks up through all-metal aircraft and heavy armor as the decades roll forward, which is one of the game's genuinely satisfying feedback loops. Three starting scenarios, 1933, 1936, and 1939, let you shape the pre-war period or dive straight into the conflict, and a 1944 scenario was added post-launch. A Workshop and built-in game editor also allow community mods to extend that further. Here is where Diego the strategy veteran has to be honest with you about the ceiling. Combat resolution is almost entirely a stat comparison: stack enough combined attack value to exceed the defender's total, and you win. Terrain barely registers, weather is irrelevant, and combined-arms thinking like Blitzkrieg-style armor-infantry-air coordination has no meaningful mechanical reward. You can flood a mountain pass with super-heavy tanks and waltz through. The political AI is the bigger problem, and it remains the most-cited criticism even in later builds. The diplomatic system offers only four options, military access, trade agreements, embargoes, espionage, and war declarations, and the AI exercises them in ways that defy any recognizable logic. Expect neutral nations to backstab long-term allies for no discernible reason. Expect Stalin to invade geographically improbable targets. It undercuts any attempt to run a historically grounded campaign. So who actually enjoys this? The honest answer is players who want an Axis and Allies board game experience on a computer, not a Hearts of Iron simulation. If you have never touched a grand strategy game, this sits at a friendlier entry point than Paradox titles. The economy is accessible, the turn structure is clear, and the lack of a deep tutorial is partly offset by community guides on Steam. Where the game shines is multiplayer, where the broken AI stops being a frustration and becomes a canvas. Up to 32 players can participate, and the sandbox permissiveness means you can run genuinely wild alternate-history experiments with friends. Germany allied with the USA, Japan switching sides, Norway going on a conquest run. The chaos that breaks singleplayer becomes the point in multiplayer. Manage your expectations about the AI and the shallow combat model, and there is a low-stakes strategy sandbox here that some players have put real hours into.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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