It’s a little surprising how popular World War II is as a genre and a setting for video games. Gamers seem obsessed with fighting and refighting battles that took place over 80 years ago. Not that I am complaining, as I’m a huge fan as well. I try to play just about every WWII themed title that releases.
For example, recently we reviewed Headquarters World War II, which was a tactical wargame with vastly improved graphics compared to most others in that field. There is also Company of Heroes 3, which is a real-time strategy title and one of the best at doing that. And then there are also ones like Call of Duty: Vanguard, a shooter which returned that series to its original World War II roots. There was even a recent remake of the classic squad-based tactical title, Commandos: Origins, which we hope to review very soon.
The point is that with so many titles set during World War II, I really thought that I had seen it all, and that nobody could come up with anything new. Yes, there would be better ones produced in the future, maybe, but they would all basically be cut from the same cloth as one or more of those aforementioned games. To that, developer Green Tree Games said, “Hold my beer,” and produced Burden of Command, which really is something completely unique and new.
The premise of Burden of Command is that you play the captain of a company fighting in World War II. Specifically, players are in command of the US Army’s 7th Infantry, the Cottonbalers, which is a historic and storied regiment that fought in every American war. The Cottonbalers were featured in the book American Courage, American Carnage by Professor John C. McManus. Lots of information from that book went into the game, and the developers also had quite a few former military personnel on their team as technical advisors. They really strove for realism.
Now, unlike most wargames, even realistic ones, in Burden of Command players will face quite a few moralistic type choices along the way in addition to having to fight in many tactical battles. Those decisions can happen on or off the battlefield and make it so that you really get to know your company and the men in it. Of course, what inevitably happens is that you will eventually face choices where the consequences for your men could be very dire. Do you, for example, push ahead with an attack that has met with unexpectedly high resistance even though there will be high casualties? That could mean losing some of your men in combat who you have gotten to know and really like during the role-playing sequences. Or do you basically choose to fail your mission and try to save your men, regardless of the consequences?
Burden of Command does a great job of tracking the decisions you make and their ramifications by adding points to different scores like trust and respect. And then later on if you have, for example, earned the respect of your men, then certain battlefield maneuvers or actions might be a bit easier or more effective. You even have personal statistics like how much your leader likes to talk or how sarcastic they are. For the most part, those secondary traits just add to the role-playing aspect of Burden of Command, opening up new dialogue choices or flavor text without actually having an impact on battlefield performance.
Everything in Burden of Command has been meticulously researched. The developers even hired an archivist to go into the National Archives to find never before published photographs and combat reports to include in the game. Many of those photographs were colorized to give them even more of a realistic look. However, if you are against colorizing old photographs, you can choose to see the original black and white photos instead. Either version is really interesting and quite stunning.
With all of that great support, the role-playing aspect of Burden of Command is really amazing. In fact, I really wish that the whole game was like that. But there is also a tactical element, which is where you fight battles and will spend most of your time. This is where the title falls a bit short of expectations. The developers created a whole new kind of system for fighting the tactical, turn-based battles. Some of that new system is pretty interesting and innovative, but other aspects seem a bit convoluted and overly mechanical.
On the good side, because this is a leadership RPG, the turn-based combat is based on orders. You have to expend an action point from an officer in the field to even activate a combat unit and then spend the points of that activated unit to get them to do something, like move or shoot. So, players can run out of either unit or officer actions on a turn, which makes sense because one person can only control so many things in a short period of time. You can have multiple officers in the field, with one commanding, for example, the infantry platoons and another giving orders to the machinegun and heavy weapons teams. But you have to let the enemy take a turn when you switch officers, so careful planning is required, especially if you are trying to organize a coordinated assault, which is a big key to victory.
On the not so good side, Burden of Command puts a very heavy emphasis on morale while seriously downgrading the power of modern weaponry. The developers explain why they did this in the tutorial, saying that they didn’t want Burden of Command to be just another shoot-to-kill kind of title where you fire at an enemy and eventually eliminate them. Instead, firing at a group of enemies (or getting fired at) generally just saps the morale of that unit without killing them. I understand why morale is important, but guns are given to soldiers on modern battlefields for a reason, and it’s not to scare enemies or lessen their morale. They are there to kill, just like they did by the millions in World War II.
By contrast, in Burden of Command, even if you have two machinegun units firing at an enemy group and maybe mortars dropping high explosive rounds on their heads for good measure, you will still mostly need to get one of your infantry squads to charge at them and force them to surrender or remove them by hand-to-hand combat. That is not how the majority of World War II battles were fought, but you will be doing it here almost all of the time.
Once you learn the unusual combat system, you can master it. It’s a balanced system. It’s just that Burden of Command has such a unique role-playing aspect that I was really looking forward to it being featured as the main gameplay element. There are plenty of hardcore World War II strategy games out there, including ones that take things like morale and other factors into consideration. MicroProse’s Second Front, that we reviewed last year, is a great example. But no other title features such a deep amount of moral and command choices, so it would be nice if the majority of the game was like that.
Taken as a whole, Burden of Command is a really great title, and a breath of fresh air for the World War II military simulation genre. However, if you break it down, it’s basically an average combat simulation coupled with an amazing Telltale Games-like choices-based RPG. I found myself playing through the various missions from the African Campaign all the way to the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, fighting battles in the somewhat unique way that the game wants you to fight them, but really mostly looking forward to the RPG aspects whenever they popped up as my reward for doing that.
If you are looking for a truly unique World War II title, Burden of Command will certainly scratch that itch. It’s available on Steam for about $25, which is a great value for a game that really breaks the mold in World War II strategy.