Sudden Strike 5 Review: More of the Same, in a Good Way

It's been almost a decade since Kite Games' first Sudden Strike release. Sudden Strike 4 has gotten a positive rep since it came out, helped no doubt by the nice bundle of DLCs available.

After a lot of time in the oven, Sudden Strike 5 is finally here. This is a modern strategy game through and through, but it respects what made its predecessors great.

Almost half of my Steam library is strategy games, but through some cruel twist of fate, Sudden Strike 5 was not on my radar until recently. The developers at Kite Games helped me get up to speed during an earlier preview session, but after that, I was on my own.

Too Cool for School

When you open a new game, you are typically met with either a main menu or a tutorial level right off the bat. Sudden Strike 5 was the former, and though there was an option about your skill level to determine which hints to show, the game lacks an interactive boot camp.

Instead of a classic tutorial level, Sudden Strike 5 puts most of its informational material in an easy-to-access button nested in the top right corner. Rather than sit down and go through the guide, however, I was overcome by hubris and launched a campaign.

"I will figure it out on the fly" is a strategy that works in certain cases, but defending the island of Crete against a German air assault is most definitely not on that list.

Sudden Strike 5 lets you pick a 'spirit general' of your predilection, based on your commanding archetype. Each of them has buffs that are compatible with their style.

The selection is faction-dependent, which can lead to some funny scenarios in the case of the US and Britain. I picked Bernard Freyberg as the lore-accurate option for the Battle of Crete. The other options were Bernard Montgomery and, rather puzzlingly, George S. Patton.

When you play against the AI in Sudden Strike 5, the first thing you will notice is how closely it resembles a human player. In other words, they will try to rush your spawn and attack relentlessly, so there is no room for inaction.

The aggressiveness works fine in most scenarios, though it is a little out of place when you are fighting supposedly defending enemies, and they throw everything (including unarmed vehicles, amusingly) at your guns. In Sudden Strike 5, everything that can kill you will.

A Trial by Fire

The defense of Crete gives you a ragtag group of infantrymen and some vehicles in various states of disrepair, defending against a qualitatively and quantitatively superior German airborne force.

Sudden Strike 5 places great emphasis on supply lines. If you want to be reinforced but the enemy controls the roads into the area or the railway crossings, you need to liberate those first before calling the cavalry.

Intent on having the cavalry roll in, I instructed my infantry to charge at a German roadblock. We had no artillery, mortar, or air support, and a couple of half-tracks with machine guns obliterated my entire force. Infantry is fragile, and the game reinforces that.

This is realistic, but it also gets frustrating due to the map design. Most missions have big open fields with no cover, and only light buildings or forests near the objectives. The woods offer decent cover, but buildings are demolished quickly and take out all occupants with them when that happens.

Another balancing issue I ran into was the anti-aircraft cannons. Airstrikes and reconnaissance are massive force multipliers in Sudden Strike 5, and it's good that you can counter them, but the execution feels overdone.

A single autocannon emplacement essentially creates a no-fly zone over an area. However, the biggest offender is the German 88mm gun in the direct fire role.

In true-to-life form, it is devastating against most tanks, but the game fails to add any of its drawbacks. During a mission with the Soviet Union, a single 88mm gun was keeping my armor from entering the objective.

Since it had no infantry screen or any serious fortifications around it, I figured assaulting it would be easy: tanks firing at it from maximum range, together with two artillery pieces and a mortar team, allowing two squads of friendly infantry to close in and finish the job.

That the fires didn't kill it wasn't a surprise, but what shocked me was that, as the artillery ceased and the infantry got in range, the 88mm crew proceeded to basically ignore the hail of bullets fired at it, and methodically picked off the assault team. In the end, I had to send tanks from two different directions to finish the job, and that came at the cost of a T-34.

Unless gunners are made of some secret German material, it's weird that they are so resilient to direct fire while infantry goes down when the wind blows too hard.

Embrace Modernity

If you've played the previous game, perhaps the most glaring difference with Sudden Strike 5 is the departure from the WASD-based grid controls, moving instead to a classic WASD to pan.

The game takes an interesting approach to micromanagement. By default, units are selected individually, which I think is a downgrade from grouping as a default. This is a personal preference thing, coming from someone who prefers to run things at platoon level if given the chance.

If you double-click a unit, the game automatically selects all similar units in your field of view. The star of the show for coordinating things, however, is the Smart Squad feature.

With a single button press, you can create a coordinated 'squad' out of all units you have selected. Given how open the maps are, this was a lifesaver when contesting multiple objectives at once. I liked putting together companies that way, mixing up the ratio of infantry and armor based on the battlefield needs.

Sudden Strike 5 also introduces smart formations, which makes managing the battlefield a breeze when combined with the squad feature.

When you hold the button while dropping a move or similar order, dragging the mouse lets you pick which formation the units will take on the move. You can have everyone drive line abreast, for example, or have the heavier vehicles lead the line while unarmored ones hang behind, all with a simple drag motion.

The mechanical slickness of Sudden Strike 5 isn't without hitches, of course. One of my biggest gripes is the apparent inability to unload an individual unit from a trench or building. I had multiple cases where I wanted to send the medic out alone to pick someone up while everyone else sat in cover and provided overwatch, but had instead to unload everyone, order the medic to heal, and put the rest of the squad indoors.

Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity with Sudden Strike 5 is the audiovisual presentation. That is not to say it is bad, because this is a good-looking strategy game and the sounds are serviceable, but it's a little disheartening to see so little change from Sudden Strike 4, considering the games are nine years apart.

Now, you could arguably say that this shows where Kite Games' priorities are: the shiny bits don't get nearly as much attention as the core gameplay, and that's an order of priorities that has made the series great. It might not be the most beautiful game in the world, but Sudden Strike 5 hits the mark where it matters.

After five games, the Sudden Strike series has established itself as one of the best real-time strategy titles available, and Sudden Strike 5 keeps this legacy alive and well. The large maps give you plenty of tactical flexibility, unit pricing is well-balanced, and the new smart management features are a lifesaver for anyone allergic to micromanagement. This is not a revolutionary release, and I have some gripes with durability and effectiveness of certain unit types, but Sudden Strike 5 remains a welcome take on a winning formula.