American Civil War: Gettysburg

American Civil War: Gettysburg is a historical game that pitches you in the middle of the famous and tragic battle that took place near the town of Gettysburg between the Confederate and Union forces. The game offers multiple game modes that allow you to test your military strategies against both AI and human players.

American Civil War: Gettysburg offers several generic modes that always make their way in turn based strategy games, meaningly campaign, skirmish and multiplayer. If you’re not really familiar with how TBS/TBT titles work, be sure to go through the tutorial because you really want to be able to enjoy the large scale battles to their fullest instead of mashing your brain figuring out why you’re getting your ass kicked.

The gameplay is a fusion between turn based tactics and grand strategy. Each cluster of units is represented by a single piece like in a tabletop game and it occupies a single position in a hexagonal grid. You can move them a certain range, tell them which direction to point in and issue a stance as well as give other more detailed instructions.

When a battle commences you can zoom in, the hex map disappears and your units will be visible on a detailed battlefield. Your chess-like pieces are replaced with large numbers of actual soldiers and the battles are ready to become almost epic.

As far as difficulty goes, American Civil War: Gettysburg can be both easy and difficult, it all comes down to how well your military strategist portion of the brain works. Moving a company away from the main army renders it more vulnerable to attack as it may remain outside the cover fire range so you need to take that into consideration, along with a lot more stuff.

You also have to be careful with what types of units are used in the front line and what you need to use as counters for the enemy. A good thing about American Civil War: Gettysburg is that before you start a battle simulation, you get to assemble your army based on a given budget. There are several types of units to choose from and you have to devise the most effective army composition without having a clue about what the opponent will have.

While a battle is underway, you are able to zoom in on the action and rotate the camera to view the battle from the best angles. Visually, American Civil War: Gettysburg isn’t impressive but it does try. There are plenty of details to enjoy, the battlefields look good and the animations are decent. It’s worth a play or two, or twenty.