Making History: The Calm & the Storm

Making History: The Calm and the Storm is a turn-based grand-strategy game set in the late 1930s, developed by Muzzy Lane and published by Strategy First. You pick a nation, any nation, and manage its economy, military production, diplomacy, and research as the world lurches toward the Second World War. The high-level pitch is familiar: think a lighter-weight Hearts of Iron with a classroom-friendly interface. The execution is uneven, but there is genuine decision-making depth hiding underneath the dated presentation. The economic and military systems are the strongest parts of the package. Resource chains matter. You allocate industrial capacity between civilian needs, unit production, and research. Choosing whether to rush tank divisions or invest in a naval build-up is a real trade-off with real consequences by 1941. Diplomacy is functional rather than spectacular, covering alliances, trade agreements, and territorial demands, though the AI rarely uses these tools with any cunning. If you come expecting Paradox-level geopolitical chess, you will be disappointed. If you come expecting a solid framework for experimenting with alternate histories, the systems hold up better than the review scores suggest. The AI is the game's most honest weakness. Major powers follow scripted-enough paths that small nations can exploit obvious gaps. Playing as a minor European country and out-maneuvering the AI great powers feels less like strategic genius and more like finding a soft floor in a stress test. Modding support exists, and the community released patches and scenario tweaks that address some balance issues, so checking the Steam Workshop equivalent threads before your first session is genuinely worthwhile advice rather than a throwaway suggestion. The mod ecosystem is modest compared to Paradox titles but not negligible. For newcomers to grand strategy, this is actually a reasonable starting point precisely because of what veterans will criticize. The interface does not bury you in nested menus. The turn-based structure gives you time to think. The scope, one era, one conflict arc, is manageable rather than the civilization-spanning marathons that define the genre's heavyweights. A player who has never touched a grand-strategy title can finish a full campaign in under twenty hours and come away understanding the basic logic of resource conversion, force projection, and diplomatic leverage that underpins every game in the genre. That is not a trivial thing to offer. The 79 percent positive Steam rating on a mixed label tells you the audience is split between people who found a nostalgic or educational gem and people who bounced off the dated graphics and shallow AI. The Metacritic score of 70 from 2007 is about right for the era. Released in 2007, this is not competing with modern releases. It competes with your curiosity about a streamlined WWII sandbox that runs on basically any hardware and does not demand forty hours before the systems click. It earns that curiosity on most days, as long as you keep your expectations calibrated to a mid-tier 2007 strategy release and not a modern grand-strategy powerhouse. Diego, Scout Team