Most games won’t tell you this, but military leadership isn’t about your APM and micro skills. In fact, it’s almost completely about other stuff. It’s about inspiring the weary, comforting the dying, sorting out supply and filling paperwork as well as deploying your troops in a sensible manner to defeat the challenge at hand. Burden of Command depicts this struggle in authentic and sensible detail. Take that, Garry Grigsby’s War in the East – nobody ever told me why that game needs to simulate the rate of fire for KV-1’s rearward machinegun.
The Burden of Command campaign starts with you as the lieutenant of the 1st platoon, Nickel Company, 3rd Infantry Regiment. The “Cottonbalers” – so called for their Revolutionary war exploits in improvised fortifications – are taking part in maneuvers as US Army rushes to expand in preparation far joining the war in Europe. This will be the regiment and them men you’ll fight alongside from the shores of North Africa all the way to Germany.
On Steam, Burden of Command put out a recommendation to play the game without reading up on tips and tricks beforehand. This places a hard duty on me, the reviewer. What is necessary to critique the game adequately, and what would spoil the fun for all four of my readers? It’s hard to say, but I’ll try to strike as I go.
Rules for that moment of terror
Meanwhile, the game tries to strike a balance between isometric 2D tactics and what PC Gamer very accurately called “visual novel.” Of the former, the hardest thing to grasp will be the orders system – the rest of it is merely using those limited orders to pin the enemy, flank them, and then rush in with bayonets. Easy! Fun! Doesn’t require you to understand opaque systems of damage and cover! Embodies the truth of World War 2-era infantry combat as depicted in any serious book you read! Shows how you can have melee armies in a shooting war without resorting to turn-one charges!
If there’s a bit of the combat system that doesn’t always work, it’s the order system when applied to the enemy. I noticed, later on, that the Nazis seemed to have had more officers than I did. I still won. Once you out-suppress the enemy force and start stacking Nazi officers like cordwood, you’ll see your foes paralyzed in place. The AI doesn’t retreat their pinned units – something I learned to do the hard way – and isn’t as smart with rallying and activations as the player.
However that doesn’t make the game too easy. You still have to get to that “outsuppression” point while fighting the enemy that is often better trained and armed with superior machine guns. But that’s OK: Burden of Command will give you, time and again, the option to withdraw and take a middling victory now rather than risk men (or defeat).
And I had to take that offer once or twice – something almost unthinkable in more mainstream games. But that’s what you can do when you – and the developers – understand that you can call it quits and it won’t be the end of the world. Not every fight is critical and the only truly final battle is the one you die in.
I didn’t enlist to read!
But back to the visual novel, a phrase not often heard when discussing World War 2 games. For as much of Burden of Command will be spent mucking about in the hexes, any situation that would be too ponderous to handle with the battle engine will be resolved via text-adventure – sometimes even in the middle of the fight.
It is there, in the non-tactical land of reading the text and choosing what you hope is the right answer, that the player will advance their and their subordinates’ Mindsets (the closest system we have to straight up RPG perks), cultivate relationships with their lieutenants, look after the health and well-being of the troops, fraternize with the locals and so on.
This is the soft, less glamorous and gameable side of war than many games shall pass over. In Company of Heroes, two soldiers might discuss Superman before a hidden MG 42 opens on them, thus ending the non-combat vignette. But Burden of Command will never let you forget that you’re leading a hundred young men into constant peril. The troops will find ways to get into trouble, lieutenants may get into disagreements, locals will seem equally helpful and suspicious…
The visual novel will contain many combat-type engagements as well, be they a prolonged series of line holding actions or something not as suited to regular turn-based tactical gameplay as a small recon patrol to scout out enemy positions before an attack. Whenever the choice is more complex than “suppress or move,” the visual novel will be there.
In a sense, you’ll be able to embody your ideal officer, from someone who always puts the mission before the lives of the troops to being a father to their men. One way this will reflect on the battlefield is via dueling objectives doled our for every battle: the HQ wants you to do the mission, scoring on objectives captured (or how fast you do that) while the troops about maintaining the casualties as low as possible.
Though in all fairness, even with my ineptitude, I didn’t find it hard to constantly score the highest in both categories – certainly with the men. Must have been those advanced Caution and Cunning Mindsets at play.
Good enough for army work
And since I segued back to the Mindsets so naturally: they’re used for tests in the visual novel part, but they also grant both active and passive battlefield abilities. For example, putting three levels in Caution lets you, once per mission, to “send scouts”: make a Line of Sight check from one location within the distance of a single move. Seeing how information is power [of not getting lit up by an hidden MG nest], it’s a very useful ability.
Too bad it had only worked correctly twice in the game. Whenever I stacked my officer with a squad to risk some randie GIs rather than the officer (your “scouts” can get got if the selected hex or adjacent ones have enemies in them), the whole group would just bodily move to the new location. And it wasn’t just me butter-fingering the buttons or margarine-eyeing the icons. I checked!
But that’s the thing about Burden of Command: jank. While the crew is hard at work correcting issues post-release – patches come out daily – I had to deal with a lot of stuff. None of it was really gamebreaking, but there was an ocean of small indignities.
Missing text, unit titles being nowt but strings like TankLdr2, Fallschirm sprites turning into regular Germans for their movement, error windows popping up every time I want to call in artillery because “81mm mortars (SMOKE)” text is too tall… However, at least the last one has already been fixed, so that bodes well for those playing the game after reading this.
Say “no” to crunch, say “yes” to uncles
However, what Burden of Command has more than jank is pure uncle-power. It is a serious game that deals with serious subjects, but there’s also a pervading spirit of mirth only naturally occurring in a jocular, history-obsessed older uncle.
Not only are there smileys in the various tooltips, but they all have “noses” like this ;-). The BocoPedia/Field Manual contains entries like “A Gentle Two-Page Guide To Bullet Evasion.” Outside of the expected humor whenever the visual novels tackle a more lighthearted subject, you’ll find humorous comments peppered in the descriptions of historical photographs.
And those av-uncle-r bastards did it. Despite the odds being stacked against them, they did it. They made an RPG that covers a good deal of World War 2 while depicting situations both real and authentic. It’s not a treatise on the social history of World War 2, but it doesn’t shy away from it. You could very well use it to trick people into finally learning about more than just the Normandy landings.
What the crew at Green Tree Games managed was to mix the narrative and mechanical in a way that constantly eludes both the giants like Company of Heroes 3 (which also tackled North Africa and Italy, but badly) and venerable mids like Close Combat – wish The Bloody First had been more like this! And they also had the wherewithal and presence of mind to include a line of sight tool, something that has eluded Combat Mission for every game released thus far.
Game good
In conclusion, Burden of Command is a great game that’s getting better every day. I could see myself playing variations of it adapted for basically any army or theater of World War 2. Through an unconventional mix of genre mechanics, it immerses you into the human side of war and the oft-neglected leadership role like no other. Now give me more Sherman variant models for the later levels.