Publisher: Muzzy Lane
Developer: Muzzy Lane
System requirements: Windows XP or better; Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz or Athlon 64 X2 4200+ or better; Radeon X800 GT or GeForce 7600 GT or better; 2 GB RAM; 1 GB hard drive space.
Genre: Strategy
Release date: Summer 2010

Sometimes when I’m called upon to review or preview a game, I seriously underestimate it by trying to play it “cold turkey,” without reading the manual. Making History II is one of those games…and boy, was I wrong. Maybe if I had played the first game in the series, I wouldn’t have made that mistake. Still in its beta-testing stage, Making History II is one of the most detailed war simulators I’ve ever had the opportunity to play.

One of the first things you do is to choose a scenario. There are three, each of which covers a three-year period from the end of World War I (and the Great Depression that followed) up through the end of World War II. You then pick a nation to play from a list of around 80. Based on the website for its predecessor, there will likely be additional scenarios made by the developers and fans of the series available on the website.

You then enter the main screen. The amount of information at your fingertips is staggering. At the national level, you monitor trade agreements, diplomatic issues such as alliances or military access treaties, and other factors. Depending on your primary nation, you can also have a number of colonial regions under your control; while these are separate from your homeland, they still do what you tell them to do. Puppet nations are not in your direct control, but always act in your diplomatic favor. Keeping puppets and colonies happy is an important part of managing your nation.

Each nation is further divided into multiple regions that produce your basic resources, including farms, mines and oil wells. Military installations provide bonuses to the defenders in that region. Each region has its own predominant religion, ethnicity and culture, which determine the risk of revolution against your home nation. This is why keeping your populace happy is so important. The regional level is also where ground combat takes place; if the defenders are wiped out, the attackers take control of that region. Within some regions are cities, where you set production orders for your factories and the research topics for your universities. Each city can only work on one production order and one research topic at a time, but work orders can be queued or set to repeat.

You have control of your nation’s army, navy and air force, which can be arranged into unit groups. Some units provide attack powers, modifiers and special abilities to the group to which it’s assigned. Units and unit groups have values such as health and morale that you have to consider before sending them into battle. Your army includes regular infantry, airborne infantry, engineers, marine infantry and mountain infantry. Depending on the scenario (and whether or not you’ve researched certain topics), your air force can consist of biplane fighters such as the Boeing B-12, biplane bombers (Keystone B-6), early monoplane fighters (Boeing P-26), basic fighters (P-36 Hawk), and heavy fighters such as the P-38 Lightning. Similarly, there are several different tanks and naval vessels for each nation, and like the scenarios, it’s likely that there will be additional units made available for download from the website.

Overall, Making History II definitely looks like a game that’s going to appeal to people who love strategy games and don’t mind a lot of micromanagement. I haven’t been able to scratch the surface of what I can do in this game, because the available scenarios last for hundreds of turns, and in each turn I have to monitor the production and research of as many as a hundred different regions and cities. However, military equipment and history is one of my hobbies, and the developers will be continuing to fine-tune the game through the beta-test process, so I’m hoping they’ll come up with something to make the micromanagement a little less tedious. Making History II is definitely a game that I’ll be watching, and I have plans to go back and buy the original as well.