My verdict will remain classified for now…
Classified: France ’44 is a new turn-based strategy game, set in World War II during the desperate months leading up to the Allied invasion of France in June 1944. Take charge of a special-ops team of Allied commandos and French resistance fighters. Recruit elite operatives to build your squad, then engage in a sweeping campaign of sabotage and destruction. Deal with competing factions to build the resistance network and strike at German targets deep in occupied territory. However, the more chaos you cause, the more you’ll draw the merciless attention of the Gestapo secret police. In exciting missions inspired by the exploits of the Allies and French, the game expands on turn-based tactical concepts, bringing authentic World War 2 combat to life.
From early games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms to more modern ones like XCOM and Mario & Rabbids, turn-based strategy games have always been a part of the gaming industry. War games especially, so can this war-based take on the genre succeed or falter?
Classified France ’44 places you in the allied invasion of France as you would expect. You take turns moving your forces into position, maybe even stealthily taking out a few Nazis along the way. You can also break into buildings through windows and some objectives may have you plant explosives and have to retreat to a safe distance before it detonates.
The game has all the traditional hallmarks of a turn-based strategy game. It ultimately plays it safe and sticks to the traditional formula and design that you would come to expect from a game like this. If I have any complaints, its that the console optimisation isn’t as strong as I would have liked. Selecting your units and moving where you want them to go feels clunky, slow and ultimately awkward when other games like XCOM pull this off easily.
It also seems to run at an average framerate with subpar character models and even the audio seems to be poor in comparison to more modern TBS games.
The Verdict
Classified France ’44 is a decent TBS, but it does play it safe and isn’t optimised enough for consoles. Its missions are decent but do tend to get repetitive after a while, it’s a shame but for long-term enthusiasts of the genre or WWII buffs, I’m sure they can stomach it.