Let’s start with the campaign. There are two campaigns: one American and one German. As the US, you free France from the Nazis. As the Wehrmacht, you try to stall the Russian advance. (You can only play the Soviets in skirmish.) Both campaigns are nine or ten scenarios long and each scenario is sort of a three act play with assaults, defenses and counterattacks. You start with a flyover of the battlefield, an explanation of your mission objectives and off you go. Your mission is usually tangentially related to the victory flags you hold. You don’t even begin to collect reinforcement points in the American campaign until the midpoint of the third mission.

A surprising number of the campaign missions involve withstanding assaults. These could be a lot of fun, but the scenario set up often gives you more than enough firepower to take out whatever is coming your way. The scripted AI assaults are more a matter of numbers than tactics. This, in and of itself, is not unusual in an RTS campaign. But the unwillingness of AI attackers to rethink or readjust an avenue of attack makes the campaign duller than it would otherwise be.

The player led assaults are a little more interesting since their success is heavily dependent on getting the right match of forces at the right location. On Normal difficulty, some of these missions very difficult so you will end up playing a few scenarios more than once. The three missions per scenario structure is problematic because you’re never quite sure how many men you’ll need for the next step. Will you have to fight with what you have now? Will they move you to a different part of the battlefield with fresh troops? Will my victory flag be rebooted with fresh reinforcement points? There’s no pattern as to how this will work, so you never really know when and where you should be committing your forces. It’s easy to just say “Don’t let anyone die” but there’s little safety from air power.

There are also a lot of armor battles. This makes sense – everyone loves tanks. But the thrill of controlling squads of Shermans wears off when you find yourself doing it all the time. Some variety in mission forces with equal variety in mission structure would have gone a long way to making Order of War less of a chore.

There is a bit of role playing in the campaign since you can upgrade your troops with points you earn during the missions. There are a lot of upgrades for such a short campaign, but since you have so many tanks there is little reason to invest in artillery spotting or the like. Get better guns and better armor for your Shermans and maybe a little something for your infantry. In any case, the battles move so quickly that you never really get a sense for how things would play out differently if you chose different upgrades.

The skirmish mode is a frantic race-for-the-flags affair that never really comes together. There are a lot of flags on most maps and since your reinforcement pool is heavily dependent on grabbing them ASAP, there is an early land rush that eventually turns into a chaotic comedy of tanks running around seizing unguarded or lightly protected flags. There’s no real sense of making progress across a map; it’s more a matter of moving at a rabbit’s pace and hoping your local defense holds up until your anti-tank guns show up. There aren’t many maps to choose from, but the real problem is not the number as much as the lack of interesting tactical decisions they give the general.