You'll play with their use and application a bit before moving onto a new lesson. Instead, you'll get a steady introduction to more advanced concepts-like the ludicrously detailed sightlines and how you can and need to use each unit's sphere of awareness to your advantage. The campaign, which is broken up into three sections with four missions in each, doesn't tax the mind too hard too fast. Success takes constant vigilance over the field.įor the most part, that's not too hard to manage. Most matches will have you rapidly switching between softening up sturdy targets so that you can secure a new location and running door-to-door to clear out homes with your infantry. It's a lot of micromanagement, but there's enough tactical diversity that it works. You'll have to constantly scan the field, checking up on unit progress and making sure they have enough munitions. The adrenaline of pulling together a coordinated attack is priceless, and Steel Division is all about chaining these moments together, directed as they are by an aggressive tie to historical realism. The sum of those elements working in tandem is some ferocious blood sport. There’s a psychological element here that elevates the stakes and complexity of play. It’s impossible to perfectly secure your trucks, but foes won’t always know where you'll come from. This forces you to divert resources to supply critical positions you hold and means that you’re always a little bit vulnerable. This works because the game limits ammunition, forcing you to resupply every so often, and those units are, as you might suspect, squishy. While you’re setting up your heavy infantry, your foe is no doubt preparing their artillery to pin down your anti-tank rifles. Each of these units aligns their real-world equivalent so well that your task might be simple, but the outcome won't be. Anti-tank infantry is for taking out tanks, of course-put them where you don't want tanks rolling.
Units counter one another in a simple, self-explanatory order. With those, you'll be either holding an area or heading off to kill some guys-defense or offense. On any given map, you're only managing about 10 different unit types. Steel Division gets a lot of mileage out of some very simple concepts. It's fortunate, then, that this foundation is more than strong enough to carry the experience. You order up troops, you pick where you want them, and that's it. You have one "resource" that builds up over time, and you spend it to deploy new units. You aren't getting big unit upgrades or fiddling with new supply lines. There's no base-building or resource management to pad this out. Matches focus entirely on how well you leverage each of these units' strengths and use them as an interdependent network.
The game includes dozens of variants of each, based on different historical divisions and nations, but as far as the single-player mode goes, that's all you need to know. You'll be working with the standard array of tanks, vehicles, infantry, and artillery. Steel Division may layer on meta-strategy later on, but the basics are rather simple. Thankfully, however, that's not the case.
That, plus the fact that Steel Division comes from hardcore strategy publisher Paradox Interactive, might lead you to think the game isn't inviting to new players.