Desert Rats vs. Afrika Korps

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $10.25

Features:

• Manage complex battles in real-time or give orders to troops in the classic turn-by-turn style
• Lead more than 70 realistic units from machine gunners to tank -- and use their unique strengths to win
• As you progress from mission to mission, you'll use your commander skills to take advantage of more experienced soldiers & captured equipment -- opening up new strategic options
• Effective AI -- soldiers will attack from different directions, coordinate attacks and go after crucial buildings to beat you
• The battles come to life with beautiful graphics, realistic damage and amazing weather effects

Accessories:

PC Gamer (1-year)

Customer Reviews:

Thought Provoking [Posted on 2005-05-01]
Very good strategic title, with the graphics and gameplay to go right along with it. Very nice to come home after a long work day and sit down to a well thought out title. I'm currently playing this title, and enjoy it very much. The only thing I highly suggest to you Nvidia graphic card holders, is to make sure you are running the most updated graphic drivers available from www.nvidia.com. It has a very extensive paper manual that comes with the game. You should absolutely read it. Hehe. Have fun with it.

Video issues, unable to play- you have been warned [Posted on 2005-10-23]
Is this a good game? I'll never know. I bought it last Christmas, and now, almost 12 months later, I still can't play it. I have the best computer I could get: 3.6 Ghz, a Nvidia Gforce 4 (256 MB, one of the best), the latest drivers for it, 512 of RAM, 160 GB of free space, clean of spyware and with only 2 resident programs running in the background (average CPU usage of 2%).

Still the game refuses to run, claiming that there is no video card in my computer (!!!). I find this strange as games like Call of Duty and the Sims 2 can run with the graphics set to the higest settings. The box says the game should work well with all Nvidia cards, so I checked the readme file, which says the following:

"The game requires a video card Nvidia GeForce 2 or ATI radeon 8500 and above"

Which means that the game works with all the ATI Radeon cards (From the 8500 and above) but of the Nvidia cards ONLY the Geforce 2 is compatible. There you have it. The box didn't say that. It's a fraud. I've been robbed. And you will be too if you buy this.

I was really looking forward to this game- apparently no other game lets you control soldiers and tanks of WWII the same way you control your troops in Age of Empires, and with extremely detailed graphics. Too bad this one is a fraud.

Severely Flawed [Posted on 2005-11-23]
This game has some serious litations.

There are no patches for the bugs, and probably never will be. You can see for yourself by doing a Google Search. Among the weirdness---- enemy soldiers shoot at burning hulks of tanks over and over, instead of responding to attack....moving vehicles get "Stuck" and won't go off the map at the checkpoints the game flags for you. You have to replay the entire scenario over again to finally find the exact spot to exit vehicles at checkpoints. There's more, but these were ones that kept happening to me.

It has a little story line, with cut scenes. These played very choppy on my system, and really didn't add anything at all to the game play. Whenever you want to progress, the game takes a LONG time to load from one segment to another. If you don't have the Reccomended specs, you might want to reconsider buying this game..Minimum specs probably won't cut it.

The difficulty is above average for this type of game. If you are not familiar with RTS (Real Time Strategy Games) you are likely to find this frustrating. We aren't just talking challenging, we are talking the designers did not do a good job of balancing things. Some scenarios, even in the Easy setting, are pretty much impossible.

Speaking of scenarios....there are only a few, and once you have gone through them, that is it. You can't create new scenarios. There may now be a Map Editor patch, but it isn't in the game.

Although you can use soldiers, they can't dig in, and they are DECIMATED by the numerous armored vehicles. Aside from Scouts to get information for your armour, soldiers are just useless.

There are aircraft, but they play a fairly limited role, spotting or bombing.

On the plus side, the graphics are, in my opinion, great. I am sure you can find some Screen shots, or even a Demo to try out.

A MAJOR plus is that you can set the game speed at several settings...it can of course be paused, you give commands, then un-pause, and the commands are executed. That is not what I am talking about. This game (unlike any other I have seen) allows you to put the game in several settings of Slow Motion. I loved this aspect.

Bottom line: before you buy, go to the official website, and read the posts by the fans. There are better tank games out there.

Look elsewhere [Posted on 2005-12-08]
Looking for a real time WWII strategy game in the store I found this one. I had to pick it up since it was the only one. However despite it's low price I should have my spent my money in something else. The videos are choppy (and don't contribute anything to the game anyway) but what pissed me off more was that the 'strategy' consists of massing all your tanks and throwing them at the enemy, hoping for the best, since your soldiers suck completely. they stand there and get volatilized by one sigle machine gun nest.

next time I'll buy commandos 2- it seems that I'll have to use my head to win it. look elsewhere for a good RTS strategy game- look for Codename Panzers, Bliztkrieg, etc. Good luck.

A good game on a hard to find subject [Posted on 2007-11-14]
One of the very few games on Afrika Korps. Very good 3d graphics, play, and sound; Nvidia cards need updated drivers, check the game's forum.

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