Frontline : The Longest Day

The Longest Day is the new title in Slitherine's Frontline series of accessible World War 2 strategy games.

As you might expect from the name, it moves the action from the Eastern front to the West, focusing on the D-Day landings.

Ongoing series of games are nothing new, of course, and they can be great. But there's an unwritten, cardinal rule of releasing a serial franchise: each new games should be more polished than the last.

Longest Day breaks this essential stricture with considerable force.

It starts right at the beginning of the play experience. One of the fun things about its predecessor was the fact that it was a pick up and play title from a hardcore wargaming studio.

In spite of its simplicity, it still had the common decency to tell you how to play over the course of the first few missions.

The Longest Day just throws you right in, assuming you know what you're doing. Which veterans might, but new players will not.

To add insult to injury, there isn't even an instruction manual that confused neophytes could use to help them acclimatise.

Making matters worse, there's no gentle difficulty curve either. The first mission throws you right into the deep waters of the English Channel.
.
Your mission is to take a small landing force and create a beachhead against a large, heavily fortified German force.

It might be historical, but it isn't easy.

If you don't give up in frustration over the first few turns, the charms of the Frontline engine begin to reveal themselves.

Moving and fighting is just a matter of a couple of taps. Yet the easy interface hides a series of tough decisions.

Troops next to one another offer mutual support in combat. So you need to keep your troops closely co-ordinated while doing your best to split up enemy formations.

There's an impressive roster of different troop types, with specific strengths, weaknesses and roles to play in battle. Once you've captured a town, you can use it as a forward position to launch reinforcements from.

This system worked a treat when playing through the titanic clashes of the Eastern Front. But it feels like a poor fit for the D-Day landings.

If you're having to land troops from the sea, where's the sense in being able to buy and add new troops to captured towns? If you're fighting in enemy territory, why do you have access to excessively powerful airstrikes on demand?

The simple one-to-ten unit strength rating was sufficient at the high scale of the previous game. But it feels odd in these more intimate encounters.

Tanks on the Normandy beaches operated alone, or in tiny squads. Saddled in the game with the same one to ten rating as infantry, you can't help but wonder what it's supposed to represent.

The gradual disintegration of unit strength isn't detailed enough to be realistic.

Indeed, pretty much everything seems to be down a notch from the previous game. The presentation isn't as smart. Minor bugs abound.

The AI seems flatly disinterested in responding to your movement, as perhaps befits a force operating on the defence. But it makes for more of a gradual grind than an engaging strategy game.

Seeing as there was no multi-player option in the original, it's not surprising to find it also missing here.

D-Day was one of the most pivotal, dangerous, and heroic moments of the war. Any game that seeks to model it needs to bring those things thrillingly to life.

The Frontline engine has a lot going for it, but it's a weak fit for this setting. And it's not helped by the unfortunate sense that this was a rushed port of a PC original.