Broken Arrow Vanguard Edition

Wargame: Red Dragon held the crown for over a decade as the go-to for anyone who wanted to run a modern combined-arms army in real time, and Broken Arrow is the first serious challenger I've played that studied that formula instead of tracing it. The difference that matters shows up before the match even starts. You don't just pick units off a list, you build a deck and then tune the units inside it, swapping loadouts, optics, missile racks and pods until a generic infantry fire team becomes something specific to how you want to fight. That customization layer is the whole pitch, and it's genuinely the best thing here. Once you're on the map, this plays like top-down modern warfare with all the fiddly parts left in. Recon comes first, always. Sending armor forward without eyes on the treeline is how you feed a platoon to an ATGM team you never saw, and the game is completely unsentimental about punishing that. Infantry hold buildings and woods, artillery makes open ground unusable, helicopters are terrifying until someone parks a SAM, and fixed-wing aircraft make one loud pass and go home to rearm. Matches scale up to ten players a side, and those big lobbies are where it looks most impressive: a wide front, several simultaneous pushes, and a supply problem that quietly decides the game an hour before anyone notices. So who is this for. If you liked the tension of scouting, spotting and reacting more than the click speed of a traditional RTS, you're the target. There's no base building and no worker units. Your economy is a points trickle you spend calling in what you already planned for, which means the interesting decisions happen in the deck editor and in the ten seconds before you commit a battalion. Players coming from Company of Heroes will find it colder and much wider. Players coming from Steel Division or WARNO will find it more granular and, in some ways, friendlier to newcomers, since the unit cards actually explain what the hardware does instead of assuming you already know. Now the rough parts, because there are several. The interface asks a lot of you and gives back less than it should. Reading a huge map through icon soup takes practice, and the camera and selection tools don't make that easier. The single-player side is the weak spot: skirmish against the AI works fine as a sandbox for testing decks, but the AI won't pressure you the way a human will, and anyone buying this hoping for a substantial scripted campaign should check what has actually shipped before committing. Multiplayer is where the game lives, which also means you inherit multiplayer problems: thin queues at off-peak hours, matches that hinge on one teammate abandoning a flank, and balance that shifts with every patch. Big lobbies can get heavy on modest hardware, too. The learning curve isn't marketing exaggeration either. Your first several matches will be losses you don't yet understand. One note on the edition: Vanguard is the upgraded bundle rather than a different game, so nothing about how it plays changes based on which version sits in your library. Pick a tier for the extras, not because you think it unlocks better strategy. What I keep coming back to is that this does one thing exceptionally well, letting you obsess over the exact composition of your force and then watch that obsession pay off or fall apart in the first ten minutes of contact. The rest is uneven and the polish isn't all the way there. If that first part sounds like your idea of a good evening, the rough edges are survivable. If you want a tidy, self-contained strategy game you can finish over a weekend, look elsewhere.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

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