Frontline: The Longest Day Review
Groundhog D-Day
06:00
H-Hour. All thirty of us are rocking in our landing craft as it tries to lug itself through the rough slate of the sea. Next to me is Harris, looking green and trying not to throw up on the captain’s shoes. Next to him is Jackson. I don’t like that guy. Ahead of us is grey, and rain. And then the smoke clears, and we see exactly what we’d been expecting. Rising up like a line of iron, topped with smoke from the bombardment that’s rocked us like the sea all night: a new hex-based wargame for Android, based on the Panzer General model. . For some of us, this day could get real short, real quick.
06:30
We’re off, out of the boats, up the beach. Bullets like a whistle between your teeth. Harris went down the moment he stepped off into the waves: his face came up bobbing red for a moment and then he was sinking again. I can hear the noises of other companies making it off the landers, I hope they’re having better luck. We’re pressing on up towards the cliffs, into the line of tank traps and wire, popping off our rifles at Germans we can barely see. I’m not dead. This is going well. Being in a hex-based wargame is fun, says Uncle Sam.
07:00
We’ve cleared a small section of the beach: a couple of airstrikes took down the Nebelwerfer battery that had been zinging our men. Saw one round splash down on the sand ten yards away, throwing three guys about like dolls. One got up, pulled his helmet straight. Two didn’t. Those airstrikes are something though. Seem to really tear up the Germans.
07:20
A pause in the fighting. A supply truck (didn’t see any of them in the landers – weird) has come up. Medics, new bullets, new faces to fill the gaps in the line. I think of Harris trying not to vomit, and his red face leaking into the surf.
07:21
Something’s wrong. Looks like the commander has tried to tap the reinforce icon on that supply truck twice? Everything has frozen. I can see a bullet stopped in mid-air…
H-Hour. All thirty of us are rocking in our landing craft as it tries to lug itself through the broken slate of the sea. Next to me is Harris, looking green. He just threw up on my boots, the sea washed them clean a moment later. Next to him is Jackson. I don’t like that guy. Ahead of us is grey, and rain and sea. And then the smoke clears, and we see exactly what we’d been expecting: a new hex-based wargame for Android, based on the Panzer General model. . Why does this day feel long already?
06:30
I thought we’d struggle, but it’s like we all somehow… expected what the Germans had to throw at us. Harris got out of the lander in a low crouch, and a bullet took Jackson in the shoulder a second after – right where Harris’ head woulda been. We’re already coming up on the edge of the beach, the Germans have been crippled by the airstrikes, and it looks like there’s a whole army behind us. Go Uncle Sam!
07:00
We got into a bit of an argument with a German rifle company, but we had support and they didn’t. Also it seems like all this stuff – wire, tank traps – the Germans left on the beach is far better cover than their own entrenchments. Which helps. Anyway, here comes the supply truck, gonna get fixed up…
06:00
H-Hour. All thirty of us are rocking in our landing craft as it tries to lug itself through the crumbling slate of the sea. Next to me is Harris, looking green. Poor fella.
07:30
Well, that beach was pretty easy. No idea why I thought it would be like a scene from sepia hell. We’ve already gotten inland, sweeping away mines and Germans as we go. Airstrikes seem to really lance Fritz up something fierce. There’s a village up ahead. Commander just went past in a jeep, heard him mutter something about ‘better save the game here’. Officers are a funny lot.
06:00
H-Hour. I don’t know how we got here, but we’re pushing in on a small village where a couple of German units are dug in. Maybe we started Overlord a day early to confuse the Germans? That must be it! Man, these generals are so clever. Ahead of us is open ground, left and right I can hear our tanks grumbling as they move into position. Overhead the low zub-zub-zub of our strike aircraft.
06:30
We’ve broken through, swept out the Germans like he was a spider in the top corner of a room. He didn’t go down too easy though: they’d left mines on the approach to the village, and I saw Jackson step on one, a dirty brown fountain with splashes of red. Harris went down as we came up on the houses, a burst of MG-bullets taking him through the chest. He cried for a few minutes, then turned over and went quiet. Our planes chewed up their counterattack before it could do any damage. An old woman came out of her cellar to shout at us. She thought we were Germans.
06:35
Here comes a supply truck – why am I so scared of it all of a sudden? The commander says he’s saved the game, it’s fine. Whatever that means.
06:00
H-Hour. We’ve just taken a village from the Germans. I think we took it in a night attack? I… don’t know how we did that. Last night we were crossing the channel, surely? And why are there mines all around us? I thought the engineers cleared them. Though maybe I dreamed that.
07:00
Airstrikes. The conga-line of planes coming in overhead seems ludicrously long. There can’t be that many planes in all of Europe. When we do go forward, we find empty entrenchments, mangled anti-tank guns, dead Germans slumped in their battledress. We drive across Normandy like tourists. Harrison sticks his head out the side of the truck, hoping to be the first one to see a French girl. All we pass is more dead Germans, and, once, five goats and a goatherd. Their little bells knock tinnily as they go back into the hedge.
08:00
We walk into Carentan without firing a shot. French people look at us sullenly from their windows. They don’t smile, or laugh. They don’t know how we got here, and, to be honest, neither do we…
In short, D-day according to the soldiers of is a confusing, miserable place, and it wasn’t much better for me as a player. In spite of glimpses of a genuinely good game, after about the tenth crash I lost any hope of trying to focus on what went right with and resigned myself to cataloguing what went wrong. Trying to resupply injured troops (something you’ll want to do every turn) can crash the game, and reloading a game from a save isn’t just slow – it causes cleared mines to reappear and resets the turn counter to 1. The resupply bug alone would probably have prevented me from completing even the first mission of the campaign, but luckily reloading a game also happens to give you magical extra resources. After about the twentieth crash, I gave in and exploited the resource bug to call in so many airstrikes that I could walk my troops to victory over an empty map (the only time an airstrike didn’t work was when it somehow magically grounded the plane, and turned it into a unit of infantry that merely like a plane – until the game crashed again, and I lost Jimmy the low-flying foot-plane forever).
I did, eventually, push through to the rest of the campaign, but by that point I couldn’t face another hour of slogging through the endless cycle of crash-save-load, and I was exhausted from battling the sluggish interface, with its callouts that kept getting in the way of the map. It turns out The Longest Day gets a whole lot longer when you put it in a mash-up with Groundhog Day.
Supply Hardcoredroid
Frontline: The Longest Day Review - App Review 4U
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