Hailing from Helsinki, HoW seemed poised to revolutionise multiplayer wargaming when it abruptly disappeared from view along with its creators Sauma Technologies late in 2009. I can't think of a wargame that captured the chaos and uncertainty of the early stages of Operation Overlord better than Hours of War, an operational co-op project that sadly never made it off the developmental beach. If the nervy descents had been followed by engaging side-scrolling combat instead of weak isometric scraps and sub-par vehicle simulations D-Day might be remembered today for its accomplishments rather than its overambition. Aerial collisions collapse canopies, church spires snag them. Choose to manually conduct one, and it's up to you to ensure a stick of amusingly animated individually controllable paratroops lands on a small DZ, rather than in the woods, villages and flooded farmland beyond. The breeze-influenced paradrops have probably aged better than any other aspect of the game. Although the easily stalled Flying Fortresses never had to contend with flak or fighters, their lack of bomb-aiming aids ensured sorties were demanding affairs. Assuming you advanced slowly and kept a careful lookout for the Panzerfaustists that occasionally popped up from hedgerows like malevolent dormice, you were almost certain to prevail.ĭ-Day's trickiest tasks were its aerial ones. Sedentary panzers blighted the armour sim interludes too. Close Combat calibre sophistication in 1992 would have been asking rather a lot (CC precursor Iron Cross was still a couple of years away) but grumbles about the static enemies, scant fog-of-war, perverse pathfinding, and omnipotent Allied mortarmen (smart players quickly discovered that bomb-tossers were the only units they needed) were not unreasonable.
The strat map-sparked real-time skirmishes suffered particularly badly. Questionable design decisions undermined D-Day's dazzling diversity. Sadly, most of the tension and drama was not. The colour and scale of the June 6th, 1944 invasion was definitely there. You bounced from issuing orders on a huge nodal map of the Normandy coast to guiding individual soldiers around isometric battlefields lousy with Panthers and pillboxes. Bursts of first-person Sherman tank simulation mingled with sorties in viewed-from-behind B-17 bombers. The French devs spent three years coding an offering as multifaceted as a Mk 2 hand grenade. Operation Overlord entertainments don't come more all-encompassing than Futura's 1992 folly, D-Day. In today's Flare Path I mark the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings by spotlighting a clutch of D-Day diversions that dared to be different. The best-known Operation Overlord games aren't necessarily the most interesting or the bravest Operation Overlord games.
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