Review by: Troy Goodfellow

How do you evaluate an expansion pack for a game that has been patched as many times as Hearts of Iron 3? Though I was very impressed by the core design and customizable experience of HoI 3, it had AI issues from day one and it took some time to work that out. So even without the expansion, it is a far more challenging and interesting game than it was on release.

The Semper Fi expansion is modest insofar as these things go. The clock has not been advanced (the game still ends in 1948), the tech tree has not been changed, and some of the changes – such as the headquarter hierarchy mapping – are long overdue. It is now much easier to know which of your units are too far from an HQ to get timely orders and reinforcements, though the AI auto-deployment still has a bad habit of attaching all of your newly produced troops to Army Headquarters instead of a corps or division. At least this new feature helps you track them down.

The big changes are the global bonuses for having reached certain targets (a 200 division army, for example, gives you organization and leadership bonuses) and the ability to customize your war aims. Maybe you think that taking Delhi is a stupid goal for the Nazis and they should credit for taking Archangel instead. You need to have 15 victory conditions, and when you meet them all, you win. Both of these add a little metagame to the enterprise, especially in multiplayer where your opponent may not know why you are taking certain actions. Is it for that big bonus achievement or so you can push to Sinkiang?

Paradox attempts to add some color through events that trigger in combat. For example, if you win a major battle, your government will become more popular. Lose one and the people will wonder why they ever let you take power. These happen rarely enough to be a treat, but ultimately have little impact on the course of a war or a political system. There are too many other stats going into the hopper for the events to be more than color, and that color is as beige as the text box that describe what is happening.

Semper Fi is a perfectly adequate expansion, but it has none of the post-war stuff that the Hearts of Iron 2 expansions had or genuinely game changing mechanics of the final Europa Universalis 3 expansion. It's more a fine super-patch than an extension or elaboration on the game as it stood.

Troy Goodfellow is a regular contributor to GameShark and many other sites. He is strategy columnist for PCGamer magazine, blogs regularly at Flash of Steel where he hosts a strategy game themed podcast, Three Moves Ahead .