Axis & Allies is a real-time strategy World War II video game developed by TimeGate Studios and published by Atari for Microsoft Windows. The game was released on November 2, 2004. It is based on the board game series Axis & Allies from Milton Bradley and also on TimeGate's Kohan series. Set in the years after Japan and the United States entered into the war, the game allows the player to act as a World War II commander to build military forces to fight against other generals, using military units and technologies from the war. The player is able to rewrite and recreate the history of World War II.
The game is TimeGate's best-selling game release, upon the company's closure in 2013. The game was met with positive reception, although some reviewers claimed the game fell short in terms of AI mechanics and in an overemphasis on base management. Axis & Allies: Collector's Edition was released as a new name for the game on August 28, 2006 by Encore Software.
Gameplay
In Axis & Allies, the player assumes the role of a military general of one of the five superpowers of World War II: the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Soviet Union, and Japan. Each nation has access to its own unique military units, such as snipers for the Soviets, flamethrower tanks for the British, and King Tiger tanks for the Germans. Four generals exist for each nation, with each general having access to unique Special Operation abilities, such as summoning fake tanks, deploying a secret agent, or giving an area buff to friendly units. Particularly noteworthy are the most expensive Special Operations, which include large damaging area of effect abilities such as carpet bombing, kamikazes, V-weapons, and nuclear bombs.
The player battles against other generals in one of three game modes: World War II, custom game, and campaign mode. Gameplay is played mainly in the real-time strategy genre, though turn-based strategy is used in WWII mode. The primary objective of gameplay is to destroy all opposing enemy military forces, though some campaigns and maps require other objectives to be completed, such as capturing certain cities, escorting a caravan, or defending a specific area. A "City Control" percentage option may be enabled, in which the winner of the battle goes to the first side/team to capture a set percentage of cities on the map.
Like in other RTS games, the player must expend resources to construct buildings and recruit units to fight the enemy, while maintaining an economy, progressing through a build tree, and researching upgrades. In standard gameplay, the player deploys building trucks from a Corps HQ, the main military headquarters building. These building trucks can "unpack" into all other essential buildings, which aid in producing combat units, technologies, and the three major resources of the game: money, ammo, and oil. Money is obtained as a constant flow of revenue from specific buildings and is used to purchase combat units and technologies, whereas ammo and oil are static resources provided by buildings, and are used for combat unit upkeep. Combat units of their corresponding types are deployed from four classes of buildings: Infantry, Airborne, Mechanized, and Armor Division HQs.
Axis & Allies also includes special gameplay features, such as regimental control, chained supply, and morale.
"Regiments" are the base combat groups that the player can control. A regiment is composed of a certain squad of units, where a unit can be, for example, an Anti-Tank Infantry, a Halftrack, or a Light Tank. The player controls the entire regiment as a whole, but cannot select and control its individual units. Every unit within a regiment is different, for example, a tank destroyer will paralyze units while mortar units will splash bombard. A regiment can be toggled into three states of unit formation, which trade the regiment's movement speed for attack efficiency, meaning hit-and-run attacks are less damaging than slow advances. There is also a feature called "entrenchment" in which a regiment gains a large defensive bonus if idle for a certain period of time. Furthermore, regiments gain experience from battles and have four tiers of veterancy, which improve the attack and defense of the regiment's units with each level.