Game Review: Partisans 1941
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some men with heavy cockney accents team up with local refugees to sabotage the Nazi war effort from behind enemy lines. These hard eyed men and women blow up railway lines, slit the throats of unsuspecting Nazi wermacht soliders and
confront rotund Nazi commanders in the heart of their own base before sending him to hell in a hail of gunfire and a quip from the good guys. Were you picturing a story about the French resistance in World War 2? Perhaps a movie like the Longest Day, or a more modern take, like Inglorious Basterds? Those in the West hardly ever think of the Eastern front and the battles fought there, but Partisans 1941 does just that. The game focuses on a group of Partisans behind enemy lines, composed of escaped POWs, local villagers, and criminals who would rather fight the fascists invading their country than enrich themselves. Oddly, they still have the cockney accents though.
Partisans 1941 is a real time tactics (RTT) game, often considered a sub-genre of the better known real time strategy. You control a small squad of hand picked soldiers in real time, using stealth, cover, and unit placement before engaging in firefights to complete each mission’s objective. RTT has been mostly abandoned by the gaming industry, with the only notable entry since the early 2000s being Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun in 2016. It’s clear, however, that the folks at Alter Games love the genre and have made sure that the first game produced by their studio has been polished to a shine.
Gameplay consists of two different modes. The first mode focuses on managing your partisan camp. Players need to monitor resources like food, ammunition, and building supplies, to make sure the unit isn’t starving and their camp is maintained. You can assign each member of the unit to various tasks like hunting or chopping wood, or you can send them on small missions which give experience to the soldiers and can grant specific items like a specialized gun, grenades, or additional supplies. These missions have a percentage chance of success rather than being played out on a tactical map. This camp-building mode is serviceable, but at least in the normal difficulty there was no challenge to the tasks and they just became routine. As long as you ensure that there is enough food and supplies, and the morale of the unit is kept up, you’re never faced with hard decisions to make. In the end I actually had more guns and grenades than I knew what to do with. Forcing the player to suffer through difficult choices would have been extremely thematic, considering you're in control of an unsupported partisan unit behind enemy lines, and it feels like this was a lost opportunity for further player immersion.
The second mode, the actual real time tactics, is where the game really shines. Each mission is unique, with its own map and specific objectives. As you play through each mission you might find side-objectives that can grant your soldiers more experience and additional resources to take back to the base. It’s here that the studio’s craft and care is really apparent. Every partisan has a set of unique abilities that can be unlocked with experience, so choosing which partisans you send on a particular mission will affect how you approach the map. Balancing existing skill-sets with the need to develop your other partisans transforms each map into a puzzle to be
solved. The game does provide intel about whether a mission is more likely to require stealth or direct combat, to help guide your choice of soldiers.
During missions, even if you favor direct combat you still have to be smart about your approach. Shooting while outside of cover can get your partisans injured or incapacitated, which will hamper them or remove them from the mission completely and omit them from future missions until they have healed at your camp. Instead, setting traps, watching patrol patterns, and hiding your partisans in cover to ambush the Nazis is the best path to victory.
While stealth usually leads to fewer injuries for your partisans, failure is potentially much more catastrophic. Sneaking through enemy lines requires expert timing and a good awareness of the enemy’s vision at all times. Though you’re able to select enemies to see where they’re looking, you can only do so one at a time. Killing hostiles in stealth usually requires threading a thin needle while keeping tabs on multiple patrols. Dead Nazis need to be hidden before they’re spotted, and developing a partisan’s ability to carry a body faster can often be the difference between being detected and getting a body into a bush in time. The precision required for stealth creates a high stakes tension that had me sweating in a lot of places and makes succeeding with a plan feel amazing, especially when it’s executed with the expert cinematic precision. This is entirely facilitated by another great feature, the manipulation of time. There is no pausing, like you might see in a traditional tactics game, but you can slow down time to a near crawl to give orders to multiple units that can be executed almost simultaneously when time is returned to normal speed. Preparing an ambush, slowing time to give each partisan their target, and then snapping time back to normal speed and watching them take out a whole patrol in an instant is something that never loses its appeal.
The game is not perfect, but the faults are few and far between. There was one particular glitch that caused doors to immediately close after I opened them. It wasn’t a huge glitch, but it did cause several quickloads because it threw off the timing of an approach or caused the pathfinding of the sneaking partisan to redirect right into the sight of the guards. Another glitch let enemies detect my partisans through walls and closed doors when the mission required a sneaky approach, which had me pretty annoyed. Overall, however, the game is smooth and polished and the glitches, however frustrating, were minor.
In total, this was an excellent game, and a great entry into a genre that doesn’t have enough greats. If you like real time tactics, or enjoy games that require patience and strategy, this is a game to pick up. You won’t be disappointed.
- The Clever Coyote