Review: The Troop is an approachable wargame and acts almost as a direct successor of Battle Academy, or at least, it would be if Battle Academy was ported over to the 2020s by a team of people that really love the Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan drab-green aesthetic. The Troop has big shoes to fill, and mostly manages to, and stands proudly as one of the best World War II from the last decade.

• Genre: Turn-Based-Tactics Wargame
• Developer: Giant Flame
• Publisher: PLA Studios
• Release Date: October 18th, 2023 (Early Access 21 December, 2021)
• Price: 33,99€/ $39.99/ £30.99
• Buy at: Steam
• Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080

After nearly two years in Early Access, The Troop has finally been officially released and is ready for a thorough examination. So, is it any good? Stick around to find out. In case you haven’t read my interview with Tom, the main developer behind the game, I recommend doing so before diving into this review. It might shed light on some of the design decisions and Tom’s perspective on game development. It’s a unique interview, especially considering that Tom has more “regular” gaming tastes compared to other developers who primarily focus on wargames.

The Troop – Developer Interview

I’ve had early access to test version of the game.

Two other games come to mind: the renowned “friendliest wargame ever created,” Battle Academy, and its cartoony but deceptively complex sibling, Second Front. If you’re wondering where The Troop fits in, I’d place it somewhere in between. The Troop is a classical World War II Turn-Based Tactics Hex’a’marole at the platoon level, set during the historic D-Day naval invasion, told through the perspectives of Canadian and British soldiers. It’s a game that’s easy to pick up, similar to Battle Academy and XCOM, where your main actions involve positioning your units and giving them orders to fire. However, there’s a lot of depth hidden in its various subsystems. The Troop unapologetically identifies as a game, not a hyper-realistic combat simulator, and it’s willing to tweak history for the sake of gameplay.

A Strategy Game With D-Day Sized Content

If there’s one thing The Troop excels at is making sure players are given so much content, that its steep asking price of nearly 40 dollars, and lack of multiplayer feels justified. As I’m a single-player kind of guy, I’ll have very little to complain about this. If you’re the kind of person who would rather exchange shells with meat and bones opponents in favour of silicon enemies, The Troop will leave you feeling disenfranchised and disappointed. If you’re looking for some offline entertainment, look no further.

The Troop has 36 hand-crafted missions that call it “story mode”. I see little reason to be invested in this as a story, per se. These can be played with both Commonwealth and German forces. Some of these missions will last for well over one or two hours, depending on how cautious of a commander you are. Even if you do not mind throwing men into the grinder, some of the missions are quite difficult, so they’ll quickly knock some sense into you. The first couple does a decent enough job of putting new players through their paces, but as soon as they enter the 5th or 6th one, the difficulty ramps up significantly. Not that’s a bad thing, just be prepared for a baptism of fire as soon as the training wheels come off. And since The Troop is a simple game on the surface, I would say that this difficulty spike doesn’t feel as frustrating, because most of the mechanics are laid bare soon, so there are no under-the-hood shenanigans at play that are hard to discern. Of course, as soon as you beat these missions with both nations, there’s little incentive to keep coming back. But I would argue that 36 is such a long story campaign that most people won’t even come close to seeing the end of it. For me, it’s going to take a while before I reach its epilogue.

Each campaign consists of a total of seven missions. A unit pool is pre-selected for you, and your pre-battle choice revolves around selecting which units to take into combat. You won’t know what challenges lie beyond the hedgerow, so choosing a diverse force comprising infantry, armor, mortars, and anti-tank weapons is crucial. Unfortunately, there are no air assets available (as far as I know). Expect persistent losses and an increasing level of difficulty after each mission. These campaigns involve capturing and holding locations or completely decimating the enemy by eliminating a significant portion of their fighting force.

One frustrating aspect of the game is that it only allows you to play one campaign at a time for some inexplicable reason. So, if you start a Panzer SS campaign and want to begin another with the 8th Armored Brigade, tough luck. You’ll have to finish the first one or lose all your progress. I learned this the hard way when attempting to compare the campaigns in the first mission and inadvertently lost my first save. If there’s a way to start two campaigns simultaneously, I’ll correct this in the review, but so far, I haven’t found any such option.

Not enthralled by the idea of an unending story mode and persistent campaigns? Fight at will on the skirmish menu. Pick a map, forces, and go at it. I’m not sure if multiplayer will be added later, but it’s easy to see it as a missed opportunity here because the game’s mechanics lend themselves rather nicely to the swift player against player scuffles.

Complete Control On Combat Systems

On the surface, The Troop doesn’t strain itself too much to stand out in gameplay terms. It’s a rather basic turn-based tactical combat title where the player will be doing 3 things: checking lines of sight, moving units, and giving them fire orders. In this aspect, it’s not too dissimilar to Battle Academy, XCOM and Second Front. Engage with its subsystems, and after a couple of missions, it’s not hard to see how there’s a lot of stuff happening under the hood that manages to be both well-designed and also so very simple to understand and play around with.

First things first, yes, the game incorporates a lot of RNG (random number generation), meaning the outcome of every shot depends on luck. Your role as a commander is to maximize the chances of hitting your target while keeping your troops safe.

I suspect a developer on the Giant Flame studio is a giant trackhead: vehicles, especially, have very complex control schemes, way more than the infantry escorting them. Hull and turret are controlled separately, the same goes for every gun available (hull machine guns, the main gun, pintle machine guns). Hatches can be opened or closed once per turn, increasing view distance and shot hit percentage. At the risk of the commander getting a brainbuster, or a sneaky grenade being chucked down the hatch. Each of the vehicles in the game has armour values for every side, and every shot taken can bounce or penetrate, destroying the thanks subsystems or killing crew members. If things are looking dire, the crew can be exited. Tracks can be shot to bring problematic vehicles to a stop, allowing both tanks and infantry to manoeuvre and finish them with better shots/ angles. Every tank-on-tank battle has a lot going for it, and due to the intricacies of its systems and armour penetration values, it’s the one that gets the first shot on target that usually comes out as the winner. Some heavy tanks can withstand significant damage, requiring coordinated efforts from multiple units to take them down. The Troop effectively simulates tank combat without overwhelming players. It also demonstrates the limitations of vehicles operating independently, given their limited spotting range and vulnerability to nimble infantry. Stugs, for instance, are especially vulnerable. Once their tracks are damaged, they become sitting ducks, provided you stay out of their gun traverse radius. When properly positioned and supported, tanks can establish kill zones and control crucial parts of the map. The same applies to half-tracked transports, which can suppress enemy infantry effectively with their pintle machine guns.

You can’t control the infantry stances directly; they depend on the number of tiles moved. Moving one tile will have infantry crawl and go prone, while moving three or four tiles will leave them crouching at the end of the turn. Aside from movement, infantry mainly focuses on taking shots. As long as a hex is within your field of view, you can fire at it, even if no enemies are visible. The number of hexes moved in a single turn significantly impacts the accuracy of the shots, encouraging players to find favorable positions and aim for better shots with each passing turn. Units also have a focus meter, which depletes when they fire, move, or get suppressed. If a unit is fully suppressed, it can’t act during its turn. The focus meter operates similarly to action points in games like Xenonauts and Jagged Alliance, with each action consuming a certain number of focus points. Suppressing actions actively reduce available focus. In one particular mission (if memory serves me right, the first of the 8th Armored Campaign), I managed to win because my troops pinned down three enemy infantry squads, allowing some of my forces to flank them and end a challenging battle around a small farm on my right flank. Particularly useful in The Troop is the use of grenades. The lack of an ammo counter on the game means these pineapples of doom can be chucked liberally over hedges and walls to make mince meat of poorly positioned infantry squads. There are also deployable guns like mortars, heavy machine guns and AT. These act very much like one would expect. They can be deployed or moved, albeit slowly.

Unsurprisingly, from this description one might image a game that encourages conservative gameplay and would rather its player act in order to preserve their soldiers lives rather than squandering them, and that would be correct. The Troop is absolutely a game about taking the better fight and it’s all the the more rewarding whenever you don’t give your enemy a chance of fighting back. One of my favourite aspects of The Troop is that battles can be lengthy and dynamic, with the momentum shifting back and forth, constantly keeping players engaged and on their toes. The level of intensity is quite high. In contrast, some other games can lead to very one-sided encounters.

Troops With Uncompromising AI

Opting for a single-player-only approach can be a risky strategy if the computer-controlled opponents are not up to snuff. In the case of The Troop, I’ve witnessed enemy Panzers falling victim to and setting up ambushes in equal measure, infantry maneuvering cautiously from cover to cover to avoid sudden death, anti-tank guns carefully selecting their targets, and mortars being utilized strategically. The artificial intelligence commanders in The Troop demonstrate competence at their worst and are downright terrifying at their best. After replaying the same missions multiple times, the AI’s organic decision-making had me convinced that it’s not following a predetermined script, marking a significant improvement over other games in the genre, such as Combat Mission.

The depth of tactics exhibited by these digital commanders is truly impressive. They demonstrate a wide range of strategies, from the effective use of mortar fire to deploying smoke grenades to conceal troop movements, and consistently factor in considerations like line of sight in tank combat. The individual responsible for programming these formidable lines of code should take great pride in their work. The AI in The Troop not only performs exceptionally well but also behaves in a highly realistic and believable manner, making it some of the best AI I’ve encountered in a game of this genre. It’s truly remarkable.

Play As You Wish

I initially worte on my notepad that the game needed an overwatch mechanic for ambushes, especially in tank battles, where the first tank to spot the other often gains the upper hand. It felt like the game encouraged a playstyle reminiscent of tank duels in War Thunder, with tanks needing to move and fire in the same turn.

However, I’ve since learned that The Troop does indeed offer an overwatch mechanic, and what’s even more intriguing is that it’s optional. This extends to various in-game mechanics that players can adjust in the settings menu.

The Troop provides players with a plethora of options to customize their gaming experience according to their preferences. However, there’s a downside: these options lack critical tooltips for explanation. While most are self-explanatory (e.g., morale, morale bonus, unit spotted info, enable overwatch), some are less intuitive (e.g., experimental map camera, infantry size modifier, tabletop bocage LOS rules). If you take a look at the available options in the menu, you’ll find a wide range of settings to tinker with.

Less Than Stellar Presentation

So far, this review has largely been filled with praise, with a few occasional comments. However, one aspect that might deter some potential players is the game’s presentation. It’s graphics are decent-ish, but every single things looks so jagged, everything has rough edges. Additionally, the movement animations for infantry squads come across as extremely stiff. While these visual quirks tend to fade into the background after playing a few matches, it’s still a missed opportunity worth mentioning.

The game’s audio also leaves much to be desired. Weapons sound weak and generic, and on more than one occasion, all the audio abruptly ceased during gameplay, forcing me to restart the game. In some instances, audio failed to trigger altogether. This aspect of the game is in dire need of a significant overhaul.

Final Score: 8.5/10

When it comes down to it, there are few other games attempting what The Troop offers, and it has a lot to offer. If I hadn’t already played Combat Mission: Battle For Normandy, I’d be fully immersed in The Troop, treating it as the best game available to relive the events of D-Day. It’s the kind of game that the younger me, aged 13 to 20, would have been absolutely thrilled about. I’m just hopeful that they eventually add modding and map-making tools to expand its potential.

Pros:

1. Offers a substantial amount of content for the price.
2. Strikes a balance between being easy to pick up and play while offering considerable depth.
3. Boasts excellent Artificial Intelligence (AI) for challenging gameplay.

Cons:

1. Lacks multiplayer functionality, potentially disappointing for those seeking multiplayer experiences.
2. May not be historically accurate enough for some players.
3. Falls short in terms of presentation quality, with jagged graphics and audio issues.

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