Wars and Battles: October War

First the good. Excellent graphics - really good visuals and unit 3D detail. Easy to understand game play. Turns are smoothly transitioned from one turn to the next. As military simulations go this was excellent. Great map. Outstanding unit order of battle. Decent map size. For the two front October War this game was original in doing two separate maps, while allowing the Israeli player to prioritize air strikes on either front - good idea. Unit damage and replacement assignment (unit repair) was original and very well done. Now the bad. The AI is horrid. 4 Israeli brigades spent the first 17 turns of a 20 turn campaign game hidden in the northeast corner of the Sinai map. Units scamper around behind the lines from one aimless hex to another. Horrible AI. Lack of Fog of War is unrealistic. As the Egyptians attempted to choke off the Israeli crossing of the canal, General Adan's forces were able to ambush and obliterate the Egyptian 25th Brigade. Not possible in thi...

I bought this game today when Steam had it big Summer Sale. I didn't expect much from the game since I had bought the previous Wars and Battles: Normandy and I had problems playing that game. This game caught me off guard and actually it not a bad game once you figure out how to get into the game and how to play it. You see there is no clear guidance or instructions on how to start the game. When you first start the game up you get a popup window in the center of your monitor screen which asks you for your Screen settings. Graphics Quality, and Select Monitor settings, Fair enough I'm okay with that. But then you go into hte game's Main Menu that then asks you for an Account Name and to put what Country you are playing from. I thought wait a second why do I really need an Account set up to play a game that I just purchased. That didn't make any sense to me. So I took a wild guess and I just type my name into the account name and put in that I was playing from the United States a...

Very beautiful game in which you can learn quite a lot about the Yom Kippur war of 1973. It gives background information if you want to. I came to realize so many Arab countries supported the Syrians and Egyptians. The graphics are superb and it immerses you into believing you command the Israeli or Arab forces. Unfortunately some of the introduction texts suggest you are simply playing a game but then again, this is a great game to teach about this conflict. Thumbs up for that. Negative is the AI. I've succesfully defeated the Israeli forces as the Arab coalition only because the Israeli computer opponent didn't take any risks. That's ironic because the Israeli's won because of risk-taking, while the Egyptians lost because of their risk-aversion, at least that's one major reason. The game does show that the AA/SAM umbrella was necessary to defend against the superior Israeli air force. The graphics give you the immersion, the feeling that your Arab soldiers are being pounded from th...

I own Wars and Battles: Normandy and found that game superior to the October war. The map here is much smaller and less interesting with few tactical placements compared to the Normandy map. I played the Israeli campaign one time and had no problem to win a decisive victory over the Arabs. They where pretty passive in the late part of the game and I didn´t feel any tension or worries of the outcome. I bought this on sale for less than 6 euro but I would actually not recommend it even for that. I do however recommend you to check out the Normandy version which gave me much more enjoyment despite that the rules are pretty much the same. But I feel like the A.I in normandy was even better.

Good interesting game. Very fun.

It may not seem like much at first but this series is actually quite good. Worth checking out.

Port is kinda lazy, no manual, no turn indicator, AI is straight bad. In spite of that the game itself is quite decent and the gameplay surprisingly fun. Also, it's nice to see something else than another Normandy in '44 cookiecutter.

addictive and enjoyable...good use of free time.