Glory of Generals (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Fans of the Panzer General and Panzer Corps series will be familiar with this style of game. Glory of Generals is a hexagonal turn-based strategy title set during World War II, and it has its own way of introducing itself…in that it doesn't. As opposed to most games, Glory of Generals does not start the campaign with a small basic level, following with more levels introducing new units and fundamentals slowly over the course of campaigns. Nor is there any sort of tutorial aspect; instead, the first mission is a crushing "survive a set amount of turns" style map.

This continues through the game, ignoring the classic gaming concepts of introducing new features through different levels and allowing the player to become familiar with these fundamentals and building them up to come up with solutions. Instead, it throws up complex matches with little to no explanation. There is a tutorial choice on the main menu, which consists of three pages of text that explains the very basics of the game, but it still doesn't detail the underlying combat system or any of the mechanics beneath this.

The pacing of Glory of Generals is shockingly bad, too, and the mini-map doesn't help in identifying half the needed information, resulting in having to scroll around the map over and over during the turn. After all the possible moves are made for the turn the game does not prompt in any way to show the turn is over, and with no obvious way of finding unmoved units it means having to search around the map in case there's a random unit hidden in some terrain that has yet to be moved.

When the enemy and allies take their turns they do so very slowly and the game drags on, the possibility of putting players to sleep at points as they watch allies and enemies slowly trot across the map closer and closer. There is an option to skip during the enemies' and allies' moves, but this makes the already confusing situation worse as suddenly the landscape can drastically change with no indication of what happened. A subtle middle ground was needed here.