Poland falls... with spoilers.

[Trenchard]

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:

A key axiom of screenwriting is, the first ten pages (analogous to 10 minutes of screen time) have to a) show viewers how to watch the movie, and b) get them into it, get them to care about what happens to the characters. The opening of this campaign completely failed to do this, and that undermined my experience of the campaign quite a bit. I started out hating it and grinding my way through it just to collect the whole set of Steam achievements (LOL) and as it went on, the campaign grew on me.

I like the overall structure of it. I'd like more engagement with characters and less vagueness. I get that the opening scenarios depict a surprise attack. The problem is, especially in Mlawa, what that means for you, the player is NOT communicated with any precision. What I mean by vagueness can be illustrated with another analogy to movies: in a war movie, everyone's wearing the same uniform. For clarity, you need to differentiate characters visibly so the viewer can understand what's happening to whom.

A third principle of cinematic storytelling that was ignored: keep-alive. If a character is not a major part of what's happening right at the moment in the story, you have to put some stuff in there for the viewer to know they're still around and not get distracted by "i wonder what happened to that character." I found myself having to go back and look at the maps to make sure the characters survived scenarios, EVEN THOUGH I KNEW THEY DID.

The scenarios ranged from OK to nearly great, but play balance was all over the place. Mlawa wasn't THAT hard if you did a Brave Sir Robin and ran away like you're supposed to. The raid scenarios were good, but some scenarios were FAR too easy. None were too hard, but the situation in Mlawa could have been communicated a lot better.

Over all, as I've said in other posts, the main disappointment was that the narrative was not fleshed out at all. That, and the wildly varied play balance suggest this campaign was rushed out the the door unfinished. This really could have been the best PC2 campaign so far had the follow=through been adequate.

All of that said, I am most definitely hoping for a sequel. I have ideas for how that might play out which I will post here later.