This is the game to grab for that odd late night hour when you can no longer concentrate but somehow cannot sleep... Grab a few Nazi snacks and go to bed. Other reviews got it right: short, fast, fun, gory, not challenging, but neither easy, this game might surprise you by how enticing it can get. Plus, can you really miss a chance to kill someone called "Totenkopf Verbandefuehrer Dr. Bathory Mengele, Death Head Leader a.k.a. The Butcheress"? Definitely not one of those serious games, but worth a shot.
...though not as awesome as its elder sibling. Here you have a bit better graphics, a bit more complex story, complete with an evil empire and a rag-tag resistance force, intense action with piles of dead bodies and heaps of broken metal, yet... something is missing. Gone is what made GC1 truly special, the pre-mission guessing game of customizing your units. Gone as well is the fear of turning around the corner and walking into an ambush. Gone is the fear of losing your experienced units, that frantic scramble to retreat your one last smoking tank behind your lines. Now you have control points, and you always order new units - and your units do not keep experience between missions. No longer can you have a killer crew and load it into either an artillery vehicle or a rocket-launching terradyne, whatever suits the mission most - experience is lost, units are always new and most of them are replaceable during the mission - if you capture enough strategic locations and thus gain enough points. It still plays ok, and it hooked me enough to finish it, but surely it came nowhere near the original. Sometimes, the action is thrilling, when you are throwing more and more units at the enemy, but the poise of the original is no longer there. No way could you take your units and just rush the enemy in GC1 without scouting - many maps, you would get vaporized in cross-fire as soon as you said "charge", you needed planning, scouting, and guts to go for the kill in the opportune moment. Fulfilling objectives was never enough, you needed your squads to survive, or the odds stacked against you throughout the length of the campaigns. This is no longer there. GC2 is much closer to just another RTS - chuck out units, kill A with B and B with C, rinse and repeat, leave the dead and wounded behind. Story, visuals, and sounds are very good tho, and well above the standard of the day. If you like RTS, I´d give it a shot - there is nothing basically wrong with the gameplay here, and I recall it with some fondness. The screenshots here, incidentally, do not do the atmosphere justice - the real feel of the game is much, much above that.
