Patton Strikes Back - The Battle of the Bulge

Strategy games from the nineties were either porcelain collections of refined turn-based systems, or chaotic real-time unit commands. Patton Strikes Back settled somewhere in between, and that's precisely where it squeaked.

It's a tactical simulation of the Ardennes Offensive from December 1944, which was supposed to be a German surprise counteroffensive. It's actually called Patton Strikes Back, even though the legendary General George Patton had only a marginal role in the scenario — but that's exactly the kind of factual laziness the nineties got away with. You play American units, move them across a hexagonal map, and try to stop the Germans from breaking through. Nothing extravagant.

It plays slowly and reluctantly. Turn after turn you count screws, rotate a unit, calculate whether you can reach a position from which you can shoot, and then comes the most tedious part: units are eliminated by randomness in tables on paper. You gain nothing from the experience — no bang when tanks collide in Ambláve, just numbers in a table and the awareness that you made a mistake ten turns ago. The graphics are more informative than atmospheric, sound amounts to a click, and I think there was some music, but I can't remember it at all.

From today's perspective, it's an interesting artifact of how computer strategists imagined war as a classroom without emotion. It aged poorly because it's unnecessarily complicated for nothing, and too simple for a real experience. It lacked either a proper simulator or dramatic appeal.

It's worth playing only if you're interested in breakthrough moments of PC strategy, or if you want to clear your head from modern pressure on graphics and sound. You'll find it in a DOS emulator, and if you have the patience for hexagonal grids and tables, it's not wasted time at all. There's a certain purity to the approach — a game without distractions, just tactics and paper.