Call to Arms - Basic Edition

Forty minutes into a skirmish I had already lost on paper, my last anti-tank gunner was lying in a ditch with two rockets and an enemy IFV idling forty meters away. Firing from the top-down commander view would have splashed both rounds off the frontal plate, because the AI gunner aims at whatever it can see, not at what I want it to hit. So I dropped into direct control, crawled him along the ditch by hand, waited for the vehicle to swing its flank around, and put one rocket into the side. That swap between general and grunt is the entire design thesis here, and it is why nothing else on the modern-warfare strategy shelf plays quite like it. Structurally this is squad-scale real-time tactics rather than base-building strategy. You are not queuing production or teching up, you are managing maybe twenty to forty individual soldiers, each with a personal inventory, each carrying a countable number of magazines, grenades and rockets. Vehicles are modelled with armour facing and ammunition types that matter, so a flanking shot and a frontal shot are genuinely different events. Released in 2018 by Digitalmindsoft, the studio behind the Men of War line, it inherits that lineage almost wholesale and then bolts on first and third person control, which means any unit on the field can become a shooter protagonist for as long as you need it to be. Single-player skirmishes, online PvP and online co-op are all in the box, along with a level editor and Workshop support that keeps a steady flow of custom maps and unit packs alive years after launch. Here is the argument for buying it even if you consider yourself a strategy tourist. The skill floor looks brutal because the tutorial does the bare minimum and then abandons you, but the actual learning curve is three habits deep. First, stop moving units in a straight line and start using the crawl and hold-fire orders, because unspotted infantry win firefights that spotted infantry lose. Second, loot everything. Ammunition is finite and the enemy corpses in front of you are the resupply system, so a stalled push is usually an inventory problem rather than a tactics problem. Third, treat direct control as a scalpel, not a playstyle. Players who try to run the whole match as a shooter bounce off in two hours, and players who never touch it get frustrated when the AI wastes their heavy weapons. Internalise those three and you go from losing every engagement to reading the map properly, and that transition took me a single evening rather than the fifty hours the interface implies. What holds it back is consistency. Pathfinding remains the recurring sore point, and there is a specific flavour of pain in watching a tank take the long route around a building into an ambush you had already spotted. Friendly AI will happily stand in the open reloading while a machine gun scythes across them, so the micromanagement load in a large battle is real work rather than optional flourish. The interface is dense and unhelpful about explaining itself, and mission design leans on attrition and checkpoint pressure more than clever objectives. Being the entry tier of a wider package, this version comes with in-app purchases attached, so check exactly which content and factions your copy unlocks before you build expectations around the campaign side. The multiplayer scene has settled into a dedicated regular crowd rather than a broad matchmaking pool, which is fine for co-op nights with friends and less fine if you want an instant PvP queue at 2am. The 79 percent positive rating across roughly 24,000 Steam reviews reads about right to me: a genuinely distinctive game with rough edges that never got fully sanded down. Buy it if you want tactical decisions with physical consequences, if the phrase "the shell bounced" excites you rather than annoys you, and if you have the patience to babysit units that occasionally act like they have never seen a doorway. Skip it if you want clean automation, a polished onboarding path or a campaign that respects your evening. I keep coming back because the moments it creates, the ditch crawl and the flank shot, are ones almost no other strategy game can manufacture.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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