The Wargame series is about combining dazzling spectacle with brutal tactical realism and more real-world military hardware than you'll find in a lifetime's subscription to Jane's Defence. Wargame: Red Dragon follows along the evolutionary path set by its immediate predecessor, AirLand Battle, by introducing even more armies, more campaigns, and a new tactical environment: the ocean. As you might expect from a third game in a real-time strategy series, Red Dragon's additions aren’t gamechangers the way AirLand Battle's dynamic campaigns and aircraft are. They do, however, add some welcome variety to the old formula and also make Red Dragon the biggest, most comprehensive Wargame yet. But this progress comes with some surprising backward steps.
The Wargame series has always been about vulnerability, in that every type of unit is specifically designed to kill another type of unit. That means that vision is everything: the first side to spot the enemy can get the favorable matchups that will turn a battle into a slaughter.That gives Wargame a distinctive character. It is a game where even your best units can be snuffed out in a heartbeat, and leave you without a clue as to what just happened. A missile streaks out from a treeline and the greatest tank in your army is gone. A tank-killing missile crew celebrates their victory from its hiding place inside a forest… and then a pair of jets cover the forest in cluster bombs and kill everything inside it. This is not a game about reaction, but anticipation and inference.
That's its best and most polarizing feature, because it can be inordinately frustrating when things go against you. Not only do things go wrong quickly, but they can trigger cascades of failure.
On the other hand, this also makes for an amazing series of mind games. You are the conductor of a combat orchestra: recon units reveal traps, artillery suppresses enemy positions, then tanks and infantry to storm forward while helicopters and aircraft provide overwatch. It's intensely satisfying to figure out your opponent's entire position and strategy, just from a few stray clues and a gut feeling.
Napalm in the Morning
Red Dragon, more than any prior Wargame, delivers on the spectacle. It looks and sounds positively glorious. Forests catch fire in the wake of napalm strikes, missiles criss-cross in the sky above your troops, and aircraft engage in intense dogfights while a tank column vanishes in a cloud of helicopter rocket fire. Watching it, it's easy to sympathize with Robert Duvall's Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, high on his own supply of destructive power.
Unfortunately, Wargame doesn't really let you savor the show. Most of the time, you'll play from a position far above the action, pushing unit icons around a command map. Wargame's atmosphere is something to savor in small doses, but you can't take your eyes off the big picture for long.It's a good thing everything looks so good, because that's the main attraction of the naval combat. On ocean maps, where only warships can do battle, it's only too evident that Wargame’s design was never meant to handle the long-range scale of modern naval combat. The sight of 20th century guided-missile cruisers drawing within pistol range of one another and going broadside for a broadside is amazing, but deeply silly and at odds with the cat-and-mouse tension that makes the rest of Wargame so good.
Naval units work better when they're a part of a struggle along a coastline. Those ships make a lot more sense when they're working as support for the land forces, and whoever wins the battle at sea will win control of the coast. There are also riverine units that can provide some help further inland.
Alternate History
The new campaigns in Red Dragon are mostly good, and they do a nice job of easing you in with a short campaign covering a hypothetical second Korean War. Playing as the South Korean / US side, you start with a defensive stand using top-shelf Western hardware against North Korea's older equipment. It's entirely lopsided thanks to the Communists' numbers and a time limit on campaign objectives, and it's a good way to give newcomers a manageable task. Plus, it's great fun turning Kim Il-Sung's army into scrap metal.
Red Dragon also has some nice variety that comes with its Asian setting. A campaign covering a Chinese surprise attack on the Soviets in 1979 is a completely different ballgame from the NATO vs. Warsaw Pact battles of the previous games. The Chinese are still shaking off their Maoist hangover, and their military lags behind the Soviets in some key areas. Learning how to use China's edge in manpower to break Russian defenses before they can harden is a very different type of challenge, and that's great for forcing you to change up your play styles.The enemy AI does let down its side a little bit. It tends to employ repetitive strategies, and it really struggles as its selection of available units in one battle to the next gets whittled down by attrition. The AI is also way too prone to "fast moving" its units along roadways, which leaves them wildly vulnerable to ambushes and airstrikes.
A multiplayer campaign might have been brilliant here, but unfortunately, Red Dragon doesn't even offer the co-op campaigns of AirLand Battle, much less a 1v1 campaign. A more serious absence is in the fact that Red Dragon got rid of strategic "cards" you can play in the AirLand Battle campaign. (These are ways of spending strategic resources to change the campaign landscape: sabotage teams could paralyze enemy formations, aerial recon could reveal hostile unit composition in another territory, etc. They’re important tools that draw from the same pool of points that you use to call in reinforcements.) It was always a dilemma: more bodies on the front line, or some kind of trump card that could give you a crucial edge at the right time? That dilemma is absent in Red Dragon, and the campaign game is relatively poorer for it.
The Most Dangerous Game
There are always human adversaries, of course. Wargame has a dedicated multiplayer community and it's not hard to find a game of a reasonable size, although there are a lot of empty 10v10 lobbies out there. I found multiplayer to be tense, exciting, and stable. I did, however, see a large number of players in chat complaining about de-synchronizations in larger games. I never experienced this problem myself, but it seems like something affecting a significant portion of the community.
As with prior games, a big part of the multiplayer game is customizing your own army beforehand. This requires a dive into Wargame's "deck builder," where you compile the menu of units that will available to you in a multiplayer match. If you want, you can build an army with a little bit of everything. Want US tanks with German paratroopers and Korean attack helicopters? You can do that… but the more you place limitations on yourself, the more the game rewards you. If you limit yourself to one alliance, like Korea-Japan, then those units will cost you less. If you then add another limitation, like operating as a mechanized infantry unit, you'll get even more bonuses. It's a good system that generates a lot of variety in army composition, and makes team games more interesting.Ultimately, Red Dragon retreads a little too much old ground, and strips out some of my favorite features from AirLand Battle. It's not a clear-cut upgrade. On the other hand, Red Dragon undeniably succeeds at giving us more stuff to play with, bigger battles, and better spectacle.
Verdict
A good game in a great series, but it only gets a qualified recommendation because of its weak naval warfare and its lack of several clever features that distinguish its predecessors. Solo wargamers in particular probably want to stick with AirLand Battle, but series newcomers and multiplayer gamers will find Red Dragon the biggest, most comprehensive game in the series.
