Hearts of Iron III

Hearts of Iron is a grand strategy that allows you to take control of pretty much any country during the period of World War II. This can be anything from the major powers (Germany, England, USSR, America and Japan) to the many minors (Albania, Cuba, Mongolia, and dozens more).

The game allows you to control the politics, economy, scienctific research and military of your chosen country. You are then allowed to follow whatever path you want, creating your own alliance, or joining the Axis, Allies or Comintern. You can achieve anything given you try hard enough.

HoI3 introduces many new features, including a revitalised AI, which can be told to take over aspects of your country, to allow you to focus on only specific areas. The developers have been releasing alot of information on the game through Developers Diaries on their forums, as well as several previews written by gamers that took part in beta/press releases.

Paradox Interactive also supports their games indefinitely, with patches released quite often, even for games released 4+ years ago. Bugs are also usually ironed out quickly.

Fans of the Europa Universalis series, Victoria and Crusader Kings should definitely keep an eye on this game.

Those who enjoyed Civilisation and the campaign map of the Total War series should download the demo when released and see if this is their type of game.

It is important to note that many previews (while positive) are quite uninformed, and seem to give good ratings because they don't really know what this type of game is. The Grand Strategy genre is a bit of a niche, and many people are quite intimidated when they first learn to play these games.

Gameplay 9/10
Graphics 6/10
Learning curve very steep
Ease of use 7/10

This game has incredible potential but theres a few major elements which really let it down. The biggest problem is the AI which is terrible. It has no understanding of what its trying to do and endlessly and stupidly re-arranges itself. The supply system also doesn't work so units will be constantly out of supply. People are hopeful that patches will fix it but really its going to take a complete overhaul to fix the AI. It's sad because apart from these few things the rest of the game would be amazing. It just happens that the things that don't work are probably some of the most important things in the game.

HoI3 is a remake of the second of the series that has revamped a lot of areas of the game, particularly research, diplomacy and the HQ system where you can set the AI to take over the actual functioning of corps/armies if you so choose and sit back and play it as purely a strategy game merely setting axis of advance and letting the AI do it's thing. Unfortunately, as of patch 1.2, it really is not up to the task. The game is very buggy at the moment and is affected by disappearing armies, poor AI choices for production (UK building transports almost to the exclusion of everything else for example), broken weather that pretty much negates air combat, broken naval AI that splits navies into groups of 1 ship and the list goes on.

The underlying game will be a good one but I really would recommend buying it until at least patch 1.4 unless you enjoy the beta-testing experience as that is where the game is at present.

If you haven't played HoI before then I'd really recommend getting the Hearts of Iron anthology (currently $30-50 on MightyApe depending on whether you get it on special) and playing HoI2 and it's expansions (all included in that anthology) to dip your toes in the waters. It has a much less steep learning curve, is a finished product and will give you some idea of whether the genre is one that will appeal. Be aware that HoI3 is a significant step up in complexity/learning curve from there.