Broken Arrow review - realistic RTS has big problems, but it's still good

Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Tempest Rising, and essentially all the major icons of the RTS genre share the same problem, whereby tactics, positioning, and legitimately strategic play are less likely to result in victory than building 50 of the strongest units and telling them to attack, attack, attack. Glory in RTS games is often secured not through shrewd generalship but mass production. If you have more ore, a bigger base, and a larger number of troops and vehicles, you can brute force a win against even the most astute opponent.

Like its spiritual contemporaries World in Conflict and Warno - those more grounded, milsim-style RTS games - Broken Arrow doesn't let you build buildings, and controls and curtails the flow of reinforcements via a strict budgeting system. If you call for a sortie of fighter jets and they're annihilated by your opponent's anti-air defenses, you have to re-earn the points needed to 'buy' them and wait for a cooldown timer to expire before you can launch them again. On the too-rare occasions that Broken Arrow works - when the game is sporadically at its most mechanically, emotionally, and dramatically impactful - it's all owing to this dynamic.

Strategy games generally encourage you to think and behave like a despot - in service to your grand plan, your unifying vision for world domination, what's another 100 dead soldiers? Buy them. Send them. Plant a flag on the body pile. Think of Frank Klepacki's 'No Mercy,' from the soundtrack to Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn: "No mercy. Mercy is for the weak." The strength of Broken Arrow is, paradoxically, in the fragility of your troops. At the basest mechanical level, the fact that you can't spam build makes each component of your army more valuable to you.

If a heavy machine gun squad is killed, it takes time before you can draw up a replacement, time in which your opponent may surge forwards and capture an objective. It also takes attention. You have to open the reinforcements menu, choose which infantry specialization you want to call in, allocate them to a vehicle, and then specify where you want the vehicle to take them. If you're under artillery fire or a bombing raid, you'll have to guide that vehicle around the blast zones. Once your soldiers have boots on the ground, you'll need to move them into cover. And then if you want to recover some of your deployment points, you'll have to order the now-empty transport to return to base. Broken Arrow encourages and expects you to value the lives of your virtual soldiers. Just in terms of raw win-lose gameplay, you feel their losses acutely.

But you're also affected by the spectacle. When you zoom into one of Broken Arrow's colossal maps, and observe the combat from up close, the guns, explosions, and sounds of the in-flight rockets become thunderously loud. Soldiers scream into their radios - "we're under fire!" "One more hit like that and we're done for!" It's panicked and fierce, sensorily opposite to the cool, analytical remove normally expedited in RTS games.

On the contrary, when you zoom out, Broken Arrow is even more liable to catalyze a crisis of pacifism. At the macro scale, you're confronted with how much cash, resources, and human life are being consumed by the chasm of your war - three Black Hawk helicopters, 14,000kg of ammunition, and 40 Army Rangers, just to cross from one side of the street to the other. Broken Arrow's superweapons are more frightening than anything Capcom, Team Silent, or Bloober have ever summoned. Viewed from long enough range, the enemy's Patriot missile looks almost peaceful, like a sky lantern. It cruises to its maximum altitude, makes a soundless dive parabola, and announces its impact with a muted, distance-delayed 'pop.' Another 20 people dead.

Despite its fastidious attention to materiel detail (all of the units are modeled on authentic real-world counterparts, and named after their official military designations), Broken Arrow starts to feel like an anti-war game. The pyrotechnics are so intense that you don't feel glorious or strong after winning a battle so much as relieved. In the campaign, there are regular nods to the ineptitude of your commanding officers, and the futility of your efforts overall. The fictional war in the Balkans begins when the Americans, during a showcase of their new weapons systems to potential foreign buyers, accidentally shoot down a Russian drone. After bargaining for months with the German government for a shipment of Leopold tanks, when the tanks finally arrive on a train, they're instantly destroyed by an enemy air strike.

Combat in Broken Arrow is absent any real kind of glamour. Success is dependent on your ability to combine units like levers and turnwheels in a giant machine. Recon supports infantry. Infantry supports armor. Armor protects anti-air. Anti-air safeguards artillery. Artillery destroys the enemy's recon. There's no myth making. The overall impression is of a war that is so chaotic and cruel that it's impossible to discern any moments of glory. When you win, you feel lucky more than smart. Nevertheless, Broken Arrow is cerebral and tactically demanding - even on the easiest difficulty, you have to cultivate a functional knowledge of every different unit and how they complement one another.

In-turn, this produces one of Broken Arrow's largest problems. While the game is unambiguous about its military simulation pretensions and commits applaudably to that aesthetic, the jargon is often inscrutable. The game will punish you for not deploying vehicles in effective combinations, and therefore requires that you appreciate the difference between the M2A2 Bradley ESV and an M2A3 Bradley ESV. To an extent, the game's refusal to compromise is fundamental to its overall effect: it's intentionally frictional, and anticipates that players may already have a certain fetishism for military tactics, history, and hardware, and will enjoy putting that knowledge to simulated use.

But such opaqueness is also contrary to Broken Arrow's narrative and aesthetical premises. Presumably, it wants you to feel like a real commander, with real experience, presiding over a real war, but because it's often difficult to discern what each available unit is or does, you look like a chancer, banging blocks together until you happen upon something that works.

Considering the scale of its maps and the breadth of its arsenal, the campaign missions in Broken Arrow are almost all prescriptive and strung along, a series of time-limited objectives that feel as if they are only completable via a single strategy - and your role, rather than using your imagination or any type of tactical originality, is to reverse engineer that strategy. The most rewarding RTS campaigns are often the most freeform, where your only given goal in each level is to defeat the opponent and claim their territory, and it's up to you how to proceed.

Broken Arrow is considerably more structured, and will selectively curtail your unit roster - having access to all the game's armaments and being allowed to use them as you prefer is the exception, not the rule. More broadly, the campaign of Broken Arrow is overwritten, a series of setpiece scenarios, each of which are bookended by verbose cutscenes and briefings. Instead of a developed, rounded story, it begins to feel controlling and pedantic, too quick to admonish the player should they deviate from - often arbitrary - stipulations.

In one mission, while assigned to a routine supply drop, you're ambushed by the Russian army and have to improvise your defense, using cobbled together infantry and armor to repel artillery, helicopters, and fighter jets - and if you lose more than two tanks, you fail an objective and both your commanding officers take turns shouting at you for being a failure. Quite naturally given the subject matter, Broken Arrow wants to create tension, and a sense of pressure. But rather than 'real,' it becomes more like a fussy, overly programmatic videogame.

Broken Arrow is supposed to be difficult, and it is difficult. It's also meant to be a game that you have to learn, and certainly both its campaign and its multiplayer are tough to access unless you're comfortable with failure, confusion, and spending time on forums and YouTube researching the game's mechanics. And because of that, it becomes stuck on a - perhaps irreconcilable - essential paradox, whereby the level of challenge that it creates and the rigorousness that it insists upon both choke the more abstract, sensory experience. Broken Arrow is fastidious and detailed to a fault. The complexity of its systems and the precision that they demand make it feel less like a war game, or even an RTS, and more like an obtusely engineered puzzle, receptive to only one input.