Life is a highway, so they say. And in Broken Arrow, the upcoming modern warfare RTS from Steel Balalaika and Slitherine, it's a highway littered with exploded BMD fighting vehicles that I just took out with a heavy armored advance, before getting caught out by an AT attack on my flanks. Set in a fictional Eastern European war between Russia and the United States, it has a lot of tactical depth while remaining very easy to control.
The scenario is a bit cloudy from the couple of missions I played. I spent half the time driving an American dignitary around a joint Baltic States base in a tutorial mission, with the snarky implication that he only really cares about selling more tanks and planes. The other was securing a convoy route to Kaliningrad. There's not a lot of time wasted on the details of, say, why such a conflict wouldn't immediately go nuclear. Or what sparked it in the first place, for that matter. That's really not the focus. This is one for the Fulda Gap fans.
If you've ever played games like Steel Division, you'll find a lot of familiar mechanics here. Infantry, vehicles, aircraft, and support weapons are called in using a ticking income of requisition you get from holding control points, and reinforcements will spawn at specific bases before moving out to their final destination. Thus, a lot of attention has to be paid to making sure the way to the front is secure, or you might get sniped trying to bring in fresh troops.
Follow Orders
One thing I was immediately impressed by is how easy to control everything is in Broken Arrow. Units are very responsive to my commands to charge or fall back, even when I'm panic-clicking to try to fight my way out of an ambush. There are several targeting options for artillery, all of which are intuitive and easy to use. You select a munition, how long of a barrage you want, then draw a line or mark a spot and watch the shells fly. Aircraft have semi-realistic maneuverability stats, so you have to think about leaving room to turn around between strafing runs.
The Russian faction also uses drones, but they weren't available to me in either of the missions I got to play (both as the US), so it's hard to tell what their role will be. I'm particularly interested in the details there, since I've played plenty of modern war RTSes set in the "War on Terror" era, and drone warfare is one of the major factors that could take a game about our present moment and set it apart from those familiar tactical paradigms. I did get to play with some attack helicopters, which are just as responsive to commands as the other units and have a "stealth" mode where they can fly much lower to avoid detection, at a sharp cost of speed.
Support units in Broken Arrow are modeled by cargo trucks that can carry a variable amount of supplies, depending on if you just need to deploy a quick top-up to a problem spot or create a dedicated supply depot after your tanks got beat up in a head-on scrape. Once the supplies are dropped on the ground, they create a small, circular repair aura that will automatically get any vehicles inside it back to factory shape. This is a little bit of an arcadey abstraction, but it's not one I really minded much. The fact that we're taking into account the need to bring supplies to the front at all is nice.
Boots on the Ground
Infantry are especially fragile and easy to suppress, to the point that I didn't find myself using them that often. They can be garrisoned in buildings, but any amount of enemy armor seems to make light work of dislodging them. At least in the missions I played, there weren't a lot of opportunities for firefights in the streets, going house-to-house to capture a village, or holding the line with rifle squads. The focus seems to definitely be on the vehicles. But that could have just been a product of what this particular demo chose to show off.
There is a fairly detailed line-of-sight system that adds a lot of tactical depth. On one training exercise, I was able to park my tank in a bit of sunken ground where the enemy couldn't see it, peek out to take a shot, then reverse back into my hole where I was safe. In another battle, I basically used a highway overpass for cover. A lot of weapons have a longer effective range than their vision radius, making scouting valuable. Indirect fire is also a consideration, although I only had access to some lighter mortars in the demo. I'm very interested in what heavier options are available and how they could open up more possibilities.
Even on max settings, Broken Arrow does have a little bit of a budget look to it. The explosions are great, but the vehicle models are a bit flat, with fairly simple, clay-like textures that don't really react to light in a way that makes you go, "Wow!" This isn't exactly a Microsoft Flight Simulator-level replica of the F-15. But I'm generally playing so zoomed out that I'm not nitpicking the little details anyway.
From what little I've seen of Broken Arrow, I'm quite interested in finding out what the rest of its campaign, its multiplayer modes, and army builder will add to its snappy, easy-to-command RTS battles. We'll be able to take the full version for a ride this June.
