Well after playing this most of the weekend trying out different units etc, I have to change my initial statement. This is not like dystopian wars. It’s similar in the activation of units but that’s all.
Firstly the plastics are really nice, nicer than the resin imho.
Secondly this game is very tactical, from the choice of what to put where in each battlegroup to the order in which each should be activated on the board. The tactical choice in just making a list is fantastic. You need to decide at this point what units you want to activate with other units, for example do I want my Infantry transports to be supported by the
AA tanks or by Gunships, the Gunships can move on and kill any threats before my Infantry are on the ground but they can't kill Air threats, but the
AA need to deploy before they can fire so that’s a turn of shooting I will loose. For someone who loves tactical list building it’s fantastic.
Thirdly the game play is fast and very tense, due to the you go I go mechanic I found it more exciting as I could react to my opponents moves.
When we tried larger games we did start running into problems with remembering who had been activated and what unit belongs to which battlegroup but I think this was down to fatigue and having to stop mid games to get snacks, take the dog for a walk, put out the bins etc.
The Scenarios look great, we only played 2 of them, the first we played 3 times with escalating points value, this was an objective based game where our infantry had to storm a building and retrieve an objective. My son was very good at this and beat me all 3 times, we then had a go at designing our own lists for another scenario, I think that he still had his storm and kill head on because his army was geared around exclusively taking objectives from buildings, unfortunately for him we rolled a mission that required forces to move more units into the opponents half by turn 6. This threw his plan out and I managed to claw a potential win (Game ended as he suddenly remembered he had homework to do.)
I’m glad that we played the final mission because it showed that a balanced list (with Ground, Air and
AA forces) is the way to go, especially if you randomise which mission you play. There are 12 Missions in all, 6 of them are played by standard forces and 6 by Attack and Defence forces which is essentially just a tweak to the defenders army list allowance.
Overall I’m very impressed by the game, it takes a lot less dice (except when in Close combat) than anything else I’ve played and it seemed that most units were hitting on a 3+ with very little modifiers so it was fairly brutal but surprisingly this didn’t feel unbalanced or wrong