Review by: Robert Zacny

Real Warfare: 1242 is basically the combat half of a Total War title, and through eight scripted battles it loosely tells the story of Aleksandr Nevsky. Nevsky, a Russian hero-prince who turned back several foreign invasions in the 13th century, went on to star as a crypto-Communist in Sergei Eisenstein's 1939 epic of the same name. That movie, like this game, was outdated even as it was being released but had the virtue of a great score by Prokofiev. Real Warfare: 1242 has no such virtue to redeem it. It is a series of unpleasantly difficult tactical puzzles, and quickly falls into an annoying rhythm. You try, you fail, and you reload until you find the solution and execute it perfectly.

That solution is always kiting, by the way. As presented by Real Warfare, medieval generalship was all about finding your opponent's exploits. Every scenario depends on an AI that mindlessly pursues while being steadily pecked to death. Although this is a simple trick, it becomes unreasonably difficult in Real Warfare thanks to two major problems.

The first is that your soldiers are the children of that same terrible AI. They grudgingly obey your orders and love nothing more than a good scrap to the death. When every soldier counts, the mutinous bloody-mindedness on display here is far beyond frustrating. It's a shattered keyboard waiting to happen.

The second way Real Warfare creates the illusion of challenge is by stacking the odds against your army and then placing the enemy on a series of strong positions. Every mission is like trying to storm Masada with a troop of Boy Scouts. It's moderately satisfying when you nail the trick, of course, in the same way you might get a thrill with the final twists of a Rubik's cube, but it's not enough reward for the frustration incurred along the way.

Nor does Real Warfare offer any spectacle that can compare with the Total War series. The graphics are generally pleasing enough, but marred by a disastrous over-reliance on bloom effects that create some of the most lurid battles this side of Avatar. Far worse, however, are the paltry number of animations, models, and sound effects. Real Warfare is only a little more animated than a foosball table, and is certainly more annoying to listen to thanks to a bare handful of sound effects, none of which really evoke the setting or the action. For a game that has evidently sacrificed a lot of functionality for the possibility of spectacle, Real Warfare offers little to the senses.

Real Warfare: 1242 competently executes a wafer-thin idea. Its lack of ambition shields it from risks and mistakes, but it is profoundly uninteresting and unrewarding as a consequence. It is little wonder that for a game with only eight missions and a moribund multiplayer community, its brevity is not among its problems.