Cuban Missile Crisis Review (basically Total War: Red Alert... but bad)

[Music] the ussr territory is now located on the african continent the usa having drawn up an alliance with great britain is now occupying the western coast of south america i have been covering some good ass games on this channel lately so it's time for a real stinker cuban missile crisis is a 2005 real-time strategy made by some company you've never heard of and will never hear off again it's a cold war gone hot kind of scenario with the usual suspects duking it out the game is basically total war world war 3 or red alert total war something like that you initiate battles in the turn-based strategic layer and then fight them in rts mode and that sounds fun doesn't it the foreign perspective on the cold war is interesting and the graphics are nice so how come you've never heard about this game before well let's see if we can solve that mystery [Music] the tldr version is that the cuban missile crisis went bad the europeans side with the americans china sides with the ussr mao gets killed in a retaliatory strike the nuclear exchange leads to hundreds of millions of deaths all over the world we have four playable militaries first there is the american british australian alliance these guys get access to both american and british units so patents chaffees m103s but also centurions conquerors and meteor jets very nice although i do think the soviets are a lot more interesting for one simple reason at no point of the cold war did the russians have an advantage in terms of ships or aircraft but the ground forces were another matter the early cold war ussr used to field some of the most innovative and technologically advanced tank designs in the world now in real life the soviets never got to exploit this advantage before permanently losing it a decade later well that's what video games are for another faction is the franco-german european alliance unit wise this is a curiously diverse army we begin with old american land lease stuff and the surviving nazi equipment panzer 4s shermans jacked panthers and even czech headsers look at this cutie if you are so inclined you can play these guys as sort of a non-nazi vermont the europeans have access to early cold war british machines like the centurion the tech tree culminates with advanced french tank and aircraft designs there is a little bit of everything while the rest of the world is committed to world war three china is still fighting world war ii the chinese begin the campaign with is-2s kursk era short gun t-34s as well as upgraded il-2s for close air support in the first chinese operation you defend against an opportunistic soviet attack you get to defeat them using second-hand russian stuff that's funny eventually the chinese get the domestically produced tiananmen square tank so this is a low rand total war kind of game there are these heavily scripted story missions but in order to get to them you need to fight a bunch of randomly generated filler battles the strategy layer can look intimidating at first but it's actually very simple this is where you build stacks move them around and repair wounded units it's really all you do there is almost no economy to speak of all military facilities and strategic resources are only protected from the attacks of their immediate neighbors make a mental note of this map it's going to become important once we get to the expansion the game has some very curious ideas about how the economy works the reason why the nations still keep on waging war is to capture factories and storage facilities the human element is disregarded completely the economy is about factories and the more factories there are the more economical it is many russians who grew up in the 60s and 70s share this view of the world before purchasing cuban missile crisis i consulted the wisdom of steam reviews and there were quite a lot of complaints about the bad translation this actually ended up positively impacting my decision to buy the game because i love bad translations was i disappointed um a little yeah most of the text was translated from russian by a professional and it's fine but then there are weird mistakes here and there some of these are annoying others are comical for example the game keeps referring to medium tanks as middle tanks t-34 middle tank panzer iv middle tank that's because in russian medium and middle are the same word tank destroyers are called tank chasers what the [ __ ] i have no idea why chasing tanks is exactly what they don't do the writing quality is surprisingly not terrible it's all done in this dry matter of fact style like you are reading a history textbook the game is not a real simulation but it's certainly more realistic than say company of heroes units have a bunch of stats front armor rear armor even upper armor which is relevant when they are being shot by planes or artillery vehicles need to be rearmed and refueled ambulances provide medical assistance to infantry you know there are all kinds of factors that are important in evaluating tank performance in battle but there is one variable that stands above the rest well at least according to some meta research of world war ii tank combat i've read back when i was obsessed with the stuff supposedly in tank battles whoever could see the other guy first usually won vision is a critical resource in most strategy games and that is just realistic this is also when this game begins to violently fall apart the units are blind and most of them can shoot much further than they can see the units in the game seem to possess a hidden camouflage stat making them harder to detect unless they fire or move this greatly favors the defender and the game provides barely any tools to gain vision infantry squads come with officers that have binoculars a useful tool for sure but unreliable because of the aforementioned camo mechanics there are recon planes and helicopters i have never managed to successfully use one of those without it getting instantly murderized by aaa batteries that i couldn't see despite being the single most important stat the vision radius is not displayed anywhere on the unit information page the european faction begins the campaign with access to a type of an armored car that can see further than your typical tank i discovered this via trial and error and these units are just barely adequate sometimes instead of blowing up a vehicle you kill the crew inside enemy vehicles can be captured by infantry after the mission is over these get automatically exchanged for resource points or whatever the currency is called as you can see here one of my tanks ran out of gas good thing the game provides a fuel truck at the start of every level so let's refuel my tank yeah so you should really plan the battles so that they're done before you run out of fuel rearming during a mission is not viable either it costs too many ammunition points to rearm and it takes too long for this reason you will never touch the supply truck in filler missions and you might do it once or twice in story levels you get more supply vehicles in these and there are more targets to shoot at i'm not sure how the game deals with armor penetration from a math standpoint but it all seems to be mostly random sometimes tanks will one shot each other in other instances they will bounce round after round off each other's asses doing zero damage it's one of those games where saves coming is an essential mechanic there is basically no ai the bad guys will stay right where they spawned and ignore everything until they detect your troops in which case they'll return fire and sometimes chase you in defensive missions the enemy will attempt to bomb rush your position with all units and get slaughtered unless they outnumber you three to one buildings don't block shots like at all neither does terrain you see this vehicle here the reason why it's moving so slowly is because it's actually driving uphill you'd assume that the presence of a hill is an important enough detail to be communicated visually but you know i even aware i don't understand air power in this game every single enemy stack i've seen has a long range air defense battery some of the more advanced ones fire with 100 accuracy and the range is basically map wide sure you can take them out but by that time the mission should be over anyway since the batteries are always located somewhere past the enemy lines or i suppose you can order the planes to do suicide runs they'll get killed but hopefully not before [ __ ] up the bad guys or you can choose not to use planes at all and instead invest the same resources into artillery and blast the opponent from the other side of the map with no retaliation almost no retaliation the game has a counter artillery system when the artillery fires its approximate location is revealed on the minimap surprisingly enough the ai can and occasionally does take advantage of this i can't help but feel impressed when something in this garbage fire of a game actually functions correctly i'm afraid whatever you are seeing on the screen doesn't quite communicate exactly how shitty this game is to play the same tank battle can result in a flawless victory or a complete defeat with all your tanks spontaneously combusting seemingly at random it never feels like it's your fault it never feels like you were punished for making a mistake i wish moas 2 had a total war like game mode hell i wish starcraft 2 had this game mode how come this is not in like every rts it works so well so this awful game you've never heard of has a sequel you've never heard of cuban missile crisis ice crusade this is where the game's story gets to red alert two levels of complete insanity all while taking itself 100 percent completely seriously with no attempt at satire the year is 1967 world war three continues the northern hemisphere europe the us the ussr and even the chinese territories became uninhabitable creating a massive human migration southwards a reverse refugee crisis times a thousand the chinese are now living on the islands in the pacific ocean is this jade empire the usa having drawn up an alliance with great britain is now occupying the western coast of south america wait wait wait i'm pretty sure the moai statues are polynesian right yeah i guess the russians thought polynesia was in south america the soviets decide that they don't have enough factories so they invade the united states territory located in the present-day mexico this is the actual story as it is explained in the manual we don't have enough factories so we invade mexico and take theirs the funny part is that the soviets invade america from the north i.e from the frozen texas i guess that's kind of badass the ussr and the us are the only two playable sides there are new units like the americans have this thing looks like something you'd see in world of tanks and then there is this flying monstrosity it resembles one of them nazi experimental aircraft whatever they were called the biggest new addition is the new mexican tile set according to the developers mexican landscape consists mostly of abandoned road vehicles and outstack ruins there is even less variety when it comes to maps this time but on a positive side you immediately get access to units with good frontal armor and decent vision radius t64s that changes everything the filler levels no longer take 30 minutes and dozens of reloads to beat you'll be done in five the bad news is that there are still filler levels in fact i've never even made it to the first story mission because i had to go through like 40 randomly generated filler levels and after finishing two dozen or so i just got bored there it is the reason why this game is sold for a dollar no ai to speak of same units same maps over and over again clearly many talented people worked on this game the 3d models the animations buildings 2d art it's all great the visual style is good i like it better than world in conflict or red alert sure the story setup is laughable but it's also endearing in a strange way reading the obsessively detailed briefings you get the feeling that you are inside someone's world someone cared about all this too bad this person wasn't a good game designer i impulse bought this terrible game during the winter sale as a curiosity i ended up paying less than a dollar and to be perfectly honest even that feels like a rip-off if you are interested in exploring cold war-related media there might be something for you here otherwise don't bother so when placed on the chill cringe axis the missile crisis game definitely gravitates towards extreme cringe and mechanically the ivan ware is just sad well looks like the science is settled [ __ ] game from a [ __ ] publisher [Music] yes sir transportation battalion on route no ammo [Music] you

Channel: Warlockracy

Views: 137,399

Keywords: video games, gaming, game design, warlockracy, cuban missile crisis review, cuban missile crisis ice crusader review, russian red alert, real time strategy game

Id: f4t61ygY-AA

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021