World Conqueror 1945

You know what would make Risk - the world domination game with dice - a whole lot more exciting? Adding lots of extraneous rules on top of the base mechanics so that it all became a bit of a mess.

That’s a bad idea, of course. One of the most appealing things about Risk isn’t its accuracy. What makes it fun is how it allows you to see familiar countries fall under your colourful rule in one big sweep.

This is something World Conqueror 1945 should have borne in mind in toying with the formula. While all of its ideas are created out of love for the period and a desire to create a fresh strategy game from an old framework, when you put them all together they end up missing the mark.

The game is split into two different modes of play - Conquest and Campaign - both of which generally boil down to capturing all your opponents' capital cities and rolling dice to beat up other armies.

While Conquest looks like a realistic WWII strategy game thanks to a large world map with all the major nations and their positions at three different points during the war, the actual gameplay is very much your bog-standard Risk-style of warfare.

There are minor differences - some nations getting a massively unfair starting boost and the AI having a gentleman’s agreement not to attack the same side (Axis or Allies) - but it's essentially the same game.

Campaign is the meatier of the two modes, focusing on specific conflicts between a noticeably smaller number of nations and larger territories.

Although battles are played out in a Risk-style fashion using up to five dice at a time, the deployment of your troops is as much based upon the value of the land as the quantity, with even sea squares up for grabs and generating cash for the owner.

This cash can be spent on a variety of cards. Some represent the three troop types (Infantry, Armour, Artillery); some improve the quality of land (more taxes); some give you one-off strikes to damage enemies; and some hold specific bonuses to add to stacks, like the ability to travel over water.

It’s not too hard to keep track of the tiny symbols and wide range of cards after your first few goes, but the poorly translated tutorial doesn’t help matters much. It’s also unhelpful that there’s no way of telling how much you’re generating per turn - planning a turn or two ahead is impossible.

Retreat

But there’s still some enjoyment to be had moving your troops around and slowly but surely eroding the computer's control of the board.

However, this takes an extremely long time to do - hours, even - due to the often huge numbers of troops in each square resulting from the high numbers of recruits each turn. Not being able to continue an attack after the first roll doesn’t help the pace.

In the end, the main problem with World Conqueror 1945 is that it builds too much on the simple dice-throwing of games like Risk. Each separate element gets in the way of the fun part: conquering things.

Most of these new features sound exciting on paper, but put them all together and you get a strategy game that’s more a war of attrition than a war to end all wars.