Battleplan Preview: Tactical Moves, Grand Strategy Results

The year is 1944. Most of continental Europe is still under German occupation, and only a decisive offensive by the Allied powers can change that. That action came in June 1944 in the form of Operations Overlord and Bagration.

Battleplan puts you in the map room in the aftermath of the Normandy landings, and your job is simple enough: draw some arrows on the map for your subordinates to follow. If you do it right, the war might be over by Christmas. Get that wrong, however, and thousands of families will get death notices in the post.

Canadian developer Foolish Mortals Games Inc. is no stranger to planning-focused strategy games. The team had previously dipped its toes in the map warfare world back in 2020 with Radio General, but the scale you had to manage there was nothing close to that of Battleplan.

You are put in charge of multiple divisions, with operational areas so large that success or failure has a tangible effect on the outcome of the war. It's stressful business, and it's not for everyone (something the game reminds you a dozen times over), but Battleplan scratches an itch most strategy games don't.

I started following Battleplan from the day of its announcement. Having spent enough time looking at conflict maps during my time in geopolitical newsrooms, I've always felt that a lot of great strategy games were severely lacking in how they display information to players.

You typically have to pick between discrete unit displays in real-time strategy games or map control alone in grand strategy. If pressed to pick between the two, I always prefer a more tactical view on the ground, but it would be nice to have that and also be able to issue complex orders beyond "go here, shoot this" and see the control of the map change.

Battleplan tries to combine these into one game, and while it nails the assignment for the most part, there are some scope creep struggles.

Boot Camp

The campaign in the preview starts with the dress rehearsals for D-Day in England, and I found the scaling adequate even for complete beginners. Rather than dropping all thirty orders on your head at once, you learn what each of them does individually, gradually scaling up to the full set of orders.

Traditionally, strategy games give you live command of units, and you are able to react to situations as they emerge. This is fine if you are a platoon commander moving your squads about, but at higher echelons, your job is to formulate a plan and let your officers execute it, instead of meddling.

At the start of each day, you get a planning phase to draw up and issue commands down to your divisions. After that, it's in their hands. In some cases, you can instruct units to wait for a signal or set a time to execute something, but for the most part, you are just watching your plan play out after that.

If things get overwhelming, you also have a button to have your officers craft complex defense or offensive plans for you. The coward's way out, I say.

The campaign in Battleplan deals with historical battles, so it was nice to see the choice to either ride in with historical units or build your own army based on supply points. If you pick the latter, the state of your units is saved between missions, which gives a nice feeling of continuity. However, I'm partial to the historical mode as it means having to work with what's available and not what you'd prefer to have.

Trial by Fire

For the most part, missions are deceptively simple: capture this objective, defend that one, manage casualties, control an area, you get the gist of it. What I found fun is that Battleplan virtually does not care how you do it, and with how big the maps are, you can go as creative as you'd like when executing these plans.

Take the battle for Caen, for example. You are put in control of a British and Canadian contingent after taking control of Bayoux and linking up with the 6th Airborne Division. All the game asks is that you hold onto Bayoux until more forces arrive from the beaches, then move to capture the virtual fortress of Caen.

Can you pull all your troops back to Bayoux and hold? Yeah, if you like a good siege. Can you just mass your forces and zerg rush Caen? Sure. You can also hit your head against a wall and get similar results.

The two most viable options were either to hit hard and fast to capture the logistic hubs of Vire in the south and Lisieux in the east, or to besiege Caen and roll over weakened defenders.

I'm a fairly risk-averse player in most strategy games, and the idea of having to manage these two objectives while also keeping the German garrison in Caen pinned felt like going a bridge too far.

The plan, then, was to leave the 50th Infantry Division dug in for a defense in depth around Bayoux, while other units worked on shaping operations ahead of the push to besiege Caen.

A British infantry division would force the Orne River and hold short of the marshlands on its right bank, while the 6th Airborne and a Canadian infantry division would drive south and towards Caen to pin German forces while awaiting reinforcements.

I opted to keep our only armored division as a mobile reserve, launching counterattacks to help prevent any breakthroughs.

The whole thing might sound a little busy, but in-game, it just looks like a couple of arrows and lines, just how most generals would see it. The beauty of Battleplan lies in its simplicity, even though the game sometimes betrays itself.

The Debrief

Battles flow fairly smoothly in Battleplan, and though the default view has some interface bloat, it is overall a streamlined experience. The same cannot be said for what happens between missions, however.

The army builder mechanic is fairly standard at the surface level: you get a standard force, and you can use points to either requisition forces piecemeal or recruit whole formations. The requisitioning system would have worked better as a button to replenish losses in exchange of few points.

Another core component of Battleplan is officers. Each of these esteemed gentlemen has a personality style and a trait that affects the units you attach them to. The system could have ended there, but the developer figured to tack on an awkward RPG skill tree. You can ignore it, of course, but it just feels foreign to the fairly streamlined gameplay.

Ultimately, that sums up most of the problems I encountered with Battleplan: occasionally overcomplicated bits that you can happily look past because, when the battle starts, things work just how they should. Sure, I wish artillery packed more of a punch, and aircraft feel decidedly underwhelming, but the core mechanics of infantry taking and holding ground are executed better than most existing games at this scale.

The Battleplan demo is available as part of this Steam Next Fest (February 23rd-March 2nd), and if you have as much as a passing interest in strategy games or military history, this game is a must-play. The fact that no two missions play out the same sets this up to be an incredibly replayable title, and one that is bound to leave its mark once the developers finish polishing it.