Shattered Union review

There was a time when sims weren’t made by specialists, they were made by jack-of-all-genres like Warren Spector and Sid Meier. They might not have had encyclopedic knowledge or a vast respect for realism, but the imagination, flair and sense of fun they brought to their aerial creations was priceless.

What’s that got to do with Shattered Union? Well, wargaming development has followed a similar trajectory to simulations. Today, outfits that make games with turns and grids tend to make nothing-but. This narrowness often manifests itself in fossilized graphics, awful interfaces and pointless complexity. SU is a turn-based wargame without any of these shortcomings. It’s probably not a coincidence that it was made by a mainstream strategy/management studio, not a gang of dolts.

If you’re familiar with stuff like Panzer General wargames or the GBA classic Advance Wars, you’ll have some idea of what to expect from this likeable little outsider. Absurdly accessible yet tactically lush, SU recreates a near-future US civil war involving seven different factions, including an EU peacekeeping force.