Tank Battle, East Front: 1941

Written by: Sam Henry Miller

A brilliant, bipolar military-strategist once said, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few”. He was of course referring to The Queen’s Royal Air Force, but to soldiers in general, the statement holds fast. It is unfortunate that in such a fast-paced, interactive digital era, so many neglect to acknowledge the sacrifices that so many before them have made (ironically enabling this apathy to flourish). Tank Battle: East Front 1941 aims to quash this indifference via interactive, challenging and decidedly educational gameplay. It strikes precisely where historical literature and documentary are weakest, and to these few independent game developers keeping war-history vibrant and premonitory, we many owe much.

Tank Battle: East Front 1941 is just one installment of an ongoing turn-based battlefield strategy series for the iOS. The narrative-play aligns quite accurately with the 1941 German push into the Russian Front and conflict therein. In campaign mode, players experience the technological banes and boons of each military force as they alternate control between both Soviets and Germans. The goals of each battle are, akin to real war, rarely redundant. Whether it be vanquishing opposing forces, stealthily escorting convoys, holding multiple strategic locations or luring enemies out of them: positioning, timing, and sacrifice are often just as strategically significant as brute force. The battlefield is divided into hexagonal spaces which is a fairly standard engine for the genre; however, East Front 1941’s innovational value does not derive from its mechanics, yet rather how it incorporates historical fact into them.

Every unit, Soviet and German, existed. Each operated within the confines of their designed utility, influencing the small battles that would ultimately influence the outcome of the Second World War. It is ubiquitously apparent just how much tedium and due diligence Hunted Cow Studios underwent to translate these utilities into game-literate statistics. In fact, one’s survival at the higher difficulty levels depends on a thorough understanding of them. We see how swift units pay for speed with soft defense; how brutish units pay for force with sluggish maneuvering; how infantry pays for proximity with life. Accompanying these statistics is often a short blurb on how the unit performed historically. These seemingly superfluous blurbs are actually essential—terse but succinct enough to interest and educate even the most historically apathetic of gamers. Ultimately, this historical integration elevates East Front 1941 from a simple hand-held pastime for history-buffs to a mobile, interactive educator.

The gameplay is not without faults, though, even barring the occasionally distracting glitches that plague all new releases (such as soundtrack cut-outs). Most notably, East Front 1941 is light on progression—whereas most strategy games are not— which severely limits the player’s sense of reward for risk, time, and effort spent. Instead, stronger units and the occasional air strike are simply allotted over time rather than rewarded as a consequence of keen strategic play. For some gamers, this can be a game-breaker; for others, an admissible oversight due to a strong emphasis on historically congruent gameplay. It’s not easy to balance both—for major, resource-affluent developers perhaps, but our dauntless independents must find a niche and ‘focus fire’. This can sometimes cast traditionally significant factors of the genre to the underdeveloped periphery. Customization, resource accrual and expenditure and online multiplayer, for example, are a few of these staple mechanics, none of which you will find in East Front 1941. 

Nevertheless, the game’s niche content strives to counter exclusivity by way of subtlety, paving the way for the historically averse. In this effort, the game succeeds at inconspicuously educating—a tactic so deficient in other interactive war products which, more often than not, subsume education to entertainment and spectacle.

For all its potentially game-breaking deficits, Tank Battle: East Front 1941 is a clever step in subtle, hand-held and fun education so imperative to a rising politically-apathetic youth who—while launching birds into pigs with the flick of a finger—should be now, more than ever, privy to the fact that history can and does repeat itself.