Developed by Kite Games and published by Kalypso Media, Sudden Strike 5 has come a long way since its earlier titles. While every sequel improved on the formula, Sudden Strike 5 has managed to push the franchise the furthest away and can now stand proud with other RTS titles on the market. This time around, the franchise not only buffs up the game’s visual design but also introduces new mechanics that actually matter. This is our review of the PC Steam version of Sudden Strike 5, in which we experience intense World War 2 battles in a proper RTS that delivers on all fronts.
Sudden Strike 5 offers three distinct campaigns for its single-player experience. There’s the Axis campaign, which offers missions like the airborne operation during the Battle of Crete, the Battle of Crimea, and Operation Barbarossa. Then you have the Western Allies, which serve as a counter-operative campaign to the Axis onslaught and take places in similar locations but the other way around. The Soviet campaign focuses on the motherland and invites you to experience the war through their eyes in locations such as Crimea. These single-player campaigns are the main mode of experiencing Sudden Strike 5 because the online Multiplayer currently offers only two modes with just two maps in each.
Before you start playing a mission, you are taken to a brand-new screen that offers you to select a Commander from a choice of three. Each commander here has unique strengths that give you perks during the mission. These mostly fall into three main categories: Defensive, Offensive, or Support, but the actual perks will differ, with one commander providing a bonus to tanks while another provides perks for infantry. Once you are inside the mission, another new mechanic comes into play, which is called Doctrines. This unlocks special perks and abilities based on your performance in each mission and allows you to tailor your gameplay style on the go.
There is no base building in Sudden Strike 5. I just wanted to point it out quickly before jumping into additional details. But the missions require you to capture different points of interest and defend them against the onslaught of enemies, which results in smaller areas turning into a base of operations. There are multiple other smaller locations on each map that are not required for mission completion, but they are critical for your mission success, and these include control points, enemy headquarters, or just good vantage points. Securing these spots not only provides you with ammo and fuel supplies but will sometimes unlock some useful military intel as well, which is vital for the mission.
During missions, if things start to get out of hand, you can use the Tactical Pause, which slows down the time to a crawl, and you can assign missions to multiple units fighting on different fronts before resuming and seeing the units execute them. As you complete objectives and capture enemy command centers, you will start earning Prestige, the main in-game currency, which is not only used for special powers, like calling fighter planes or bombers, but also to request new units. You can only request new units from captured points such as airports or naval ports. You can also capture enemy units during battles and turn them against their former masters.
Apart from developing an offensive or defensive strategy, you will also need a support strategy because most units, and especially vehicles, require fuel and ammo constantly. For this, your army will have repair and support trucks with them at all times, which can be restocked from different Control Points spread across the maps. You also have a unit limit, so you have to choose the balance carefully. Heavier units like German Tiger tanks or the American Pershing tanks require massive unit numbers, so you have to balance them out. You cannot just spam tons of tanks and expect to win because every unit has a weakness, and you have to counter the weakness with support infantry or other vehicles.
Probably the best feature of Sudden Strike 5 is the sandbox-style nature of its main missions. Each mission can be completed in a variety of ways, and the game gives you complete freedom over it. You can choose to take your time, preserve your units, and take it slow, or you can just keep on the offensive, sacrificing as many things as you would like. The objectives have multiple approaches, different landing zones, and different strategies to opt for. Nearly every unit comes with secondary abilities that can be useful in different scenarios. Certain missions grant you access to more powerful vehicles or structures that are fun to operate. One such example is the new Armored Train, which can only be moved around on tracks, but it provides a fun new way to take out the enemies and complete missions.
The sense of scale in the game is also pretty good. I remember back in the CnC days when vehicle range was a big issue. Tanks would pile on top of the enemies to shoot at them, and even the artillery was nothing short of disappointing when it came to range. Compared with games of similar tone, Company of Heroes offered a good range for its artillery units, but this has massively increased here. In Sudden Strike 5, you can fight enemies from a pretty decent range if you are relying on long-range weapons. Artillery units like Pounder Cannons or Stut III J can engage enemies from an extremely long range that sometimes goes beyond the screen. The maps are big enough that these long-range weapons can be used freely.
For me, Sudden Strike 5 is one of the best real-time strategy games in a long time because it goes beyond the normal challenge of churning out battle tanks and rolling everything over with them to win a game. While it was challenging at first, I loved how I had to manage fuel and ammo for my tanks while ensuring that they were not blown to bits as enemies pounded them with long-range cannons. This generated an extra set of smaller details, like tanks and vehicles turning off their engines while idling, and the sounds of engines turning back on to engage incoming enemies or when given movement commands. It made me feel like I was in an actual WW2 scenario or watching a highly realistic war movie.
The visuals of Sudden Strike 5 do not disappoint either. The levels are highly detailed with multiple terrain types, and the terrain actually provides benefits due to its placement. Each mission, despite being in a particular biome, has different types of areas that you can take advantage of. You will find forests, wheat farms, rivers, wide open fields, destroyed cities, bogs, military installations, and many other interesting spots on each level. Higher areas will offer better firing range and good defense, while lower areas will become kill zones for the armies. Different structures like buildings and trees obstruct the vision of your units as well, which not only adds to the realism but also allows you to strategically place defenses or choose a wider assault line if you are on the offense.
The level design plays a critical role in planning when it comes to both offense and defense, and it is one of the best game designs that I have seen in any RTS titles in a long time. The visual detection of units changes based on different factors, and things actively block your view if they are taller than the unit. The special effects are intense as well. Different things like explosions, buildings crumbling after an artillery strike, or a destroyed unit just look amazing. When it comes to visuals and level design, Sudden Strike 5 is a treat to look at and easily one of my favourite aspects of the game. This expands to unit design as well.
At this point, Sudden Strike 5 lacks in terms of multiplayer content, with only two game modes and each offering only two maps. On the other hand, the single-player campaigns offer hours and hours of strategic fun, which is a big win for it. If you do not care about the multiplayer much, the single-player is enough to keep you occupied for a good amount of time, but if you prefer to play multiplayer as well, the two maps in each game mode might not give you much to play around with. The maps are exceptionally detailed, and the overall game design is brilliant. With the amount of activities to complete in a single mission, you can easily sink many hours into a single mission before finally completing the main objective and moving to the next. I also like the fact that to keep the context of history in place, the Axis forces now have the proper Swastika sign in their flag, and it is not hidden in any way.
Coming to the performance, Sudden Strike 5 is decently optimized and runs fairly well even on older hardware. Apart from my main 4070 PC, I also ran the game on a significantly older laptop running a GTX 1050 GPU, and it managed to run just fine. On my main PC, it ran on High visual fidelity on a 1080p screen without any sort of glitching or stutter. Certain areas in Sudden Strike 5 can become very demanding, especially during large battles, but the game’s engine manages to perform very well even in these demanding scenarios.
With all this said, Sudden Strike 5 does fall short on certain UI elements that I did not like. One of the biggest issues for me was that every time I had some units selected and moved my cursor to an enemy unit, it would replace the information on my selected units. This would remove my ability to see if any of my units are taking damage. The mini map is confusing as well, and it takes some time to get used to it. The AI of Sudden Strike 5 feels a lot improved from the previous titles, but it still acts a little silly in certain situations.
Final Verdict:
Sudden Strike 5 feels intense, not because of all the explosions and chaos that ensues on its battlefields but because of how you need to manage your armies. The real challenge here is not building armies but maintaining them during the battles. This frantic dance between destroying your enemies and constantly looking for ammo and fuel supplies manages to deliver one of the most realistic and complex WW2 RTS experiences in a long time. With gorgeous visuals and a solid audio design, there is a lot to love here. While there are a few UI hiccups, the game is a solid choice for players who want classic strategic wars and satisfying, lengthy battles.
Final Score: 8.5/10
Disclaimer: A PC Steam review code for Sudden Strike 5 was provided by Kalypso Media for this review. Read our Review Policy.
