When you go into an experience with tempered expectations, you're less likely to be disappointed. I knew that the tiny, scantily-funded indie team behind Gettysburg: Armored Warfare was trying to take a bizarre idea and give it life, and early screenshots looked promising, if a bit rough. But rough is a sugar-coated appraisal of what was actually released; Gettysburg doesn't crash, but the systems and mechanics are half-baked, making it play more like a bad pre-alpha than something any company should ask people to pay for.
Imagine a world where modern weapons travel back to the the American Civil War. That's the absurd – and hilariously awesome – premise for Gettysburg, a world where mounted cavalry run alongside armored personnel carriers, and cannons fire at fast moving tanks. It combines real-time strategy and third-person shooting, with modes that allow you to command your units across gigantic maps before hopping in and assuming direct control. Additionally there's a pure Deathmatch mode, where up to 64 players assume direct control of units and blast away at one another while trying to take control points.
Sounds pretty great, right? I know, I thought so too. But Gettysburg's myriad problems start the moment you boot it up. For starters no in-game tutorials exist. Moreover, to figure out any of the controls you either have to hunt down a manual in the forums, or just bang around on the keyboard until things happen. It's common these days for a PC games to allow you to reassign key bindings, but it's inexcusable to not even be able to view your controls from within the game
Once you've got a PDF of the controls you can finally hop into a match or single-player practice mode, which is where the real disaster unfolds. Gettysburg has issues with its design, sure, but even getting to the point where those become apparent is a challenge due to the sheer number of bugs. While games like Minecraft went on sale in pre-alpha form, Gettysburg is not billed as such, and it's shocking to see such an unfinished piece of software sold with no heads up. If I was shown Gettysburg as a proof-of-concept I could start to see where the game was heading, but as a retail release it's insulting to its customers.
Playing Gettysburg in the strategic skirmish showcases some of its most fundamental issues. Like many RTS games you can drag a box around units to select them, right clicking to send them on their way. After marching your units for far too long across overly large maps you'll be told that you can right click to attack your enemies But you can't. With the baffling exception of cannons, in my experience no other units would attack as intended. Whole waves of cavalry would get cut down by riflemen simply because they wouldn't move in and strike. You can make them move next to the units so the terrible A.I. will engage, but the attack controls are fundamentally broken. Other control options in the on-screen menu such as "defensive stance" don't seem to work either, and clicking them only makes the grating voice-actors tell you they're too inept to follow your orders. The only real option when it comes to "tactical" combat is to assume direct control of a single unit and hope you can outgun your opponent's idiotic troops.
Assuming direct control and playing Gettysburg like a third-person shooter is largely functional, but unit balance and other issues make it excruciating to play. In Deathmatch players take control of a number of pre-generated units on the field, ranging from mounted cavalry to tanks to chaingun-wielding soldiers. The first few moments in this mode might even begin to convince you that Gettysburg may have more than a scant few redeemable qualities, but then, like everything else, it falls apart. For starters the maps are still too large, making it a chore to play anything that isn't a fast moving vehicle. Then the bad production value and obvious lack of polish rear their ugly heads again and again. Walls and other "destructible" objects simply pop out of existence as tanks smash into them, offering only a momentary bit of resistance. Soldiers on the field transition quickly from becoming 3D models to atrociously animated 2D sprites when they get a short distance from you, often clipping through one another and pieces of the world like they don't exist. If Gettysburg were a steak, it would be so undercooked that it'd simply be a piece of raw meat cut straight from the cow – gross and unpalatable.
Gameplay balance is also non-existent. I get it, it's the Civil War so having cavalry fighting alongside tanks as part of the shtick, but it sucks. Horsemen get mowed down before ever reaching their targets. Tanks and armored personnel carriers can kill pretty much everything, making other units something you play only because the good units are unavailable. You can also get an armored vehicle in position to kill people right as they leave their spawn point, which makes it pretty much no fun for anyone except the person racking up the kills. Again, most of this comes down to Gettysburg being unfinished. The game's forums are full of posts about every issue I've brought up and more, with regular replies from the developer promising incoming changes to address the community's concerns.
