Making History: The Calm & The Storm Demo

No matter how many times it is used as a central plot mechanism, the second World War theme keeps on giving, since there are countless video games that seem to find plenty of new material in the conflict. Whether it’s a slightly less popular confrontation, an alternate history path or a total makeover of the war, you can certainly forget that you went through the same battles dozens of times before.

Making History: The Calm & The Storm is a grand strategy game in which you have to choose one of the 80-something nations available and use your abilities as a leader to get out of conflict alive, if you happen to be involved in it. If the second World War did not really involve the nation you have chosen, it is quite easy to join in at any time, since all you need is to show support to one of the sides, or simply declare war on a country that’s part of the conflict.

However, war and battles are not everything, because a country needs to deal with far more than that in order to be prosperous and powerful in front of its enemies. Thus, resources, politics and economical matters need to be tackled as well, otherwise you risk finding yourself in kind of a pickle when you run out of coal and you cannot power your nation’s manufacturing industry.

On the other hand, war is mighty fun and interesting, so it would be a shame it you wasted the in-game time without building a few tanks and blowing up a few bridges. The combat aspect is not as refined as in other wargames, such as Panzer General or the Hearts of Iron series, but it gets the point across and it does get pretty exciting. It also depends on the difficulty level you choose, since the A.I. responds in kind.

The genre in question is not known for visual acuity, but the game at hand does not look too bad. The textures are rather washed up and the 3D models a bit too clunky, but other than that, the user interface is quite easy-to-use after you go through the tutorial. Speaking of which, you should definitely check out the tutorial before jumping into an actual scenario, otherwise you will have a difficult time getting acquainted with the controls.

All things considered, Making History: The Calm & The Storm is definitely worthy of a try, especially if you are a fan of the genre. On the other hand, it is not as polished as other similar titles, but it does offer some unique gameplay options to make up for it.