The Bluecoats North & South 12+

Fun game, but limited and not worth the price tag

This is a fun simple game, unfortunately not worth the price tag. Though having a turn-based map, the battles are fought in real-time or in a turn-based fashion. The two armies are identical in terms of abilities, but have different starting situations and advantages in the different scenarios. There are three difficulty modes, Easy, Normal, and Hard) too to make the game easier or harder.

The AI tends to do the same things over and over again, meaning that once you learn its weaknesses it’s easy to beat. Switching between having real-time battles and turn-based battles helps, but the AI especially has a glaring weakness in turn-based battles.

There are three kinds of battles: army battles, train raids, and fort attacks. Army battles are fought as a top-down action game in real-time mode, controlling one type of unit at a time, and casualties here affect your army’s strength in the next battle. In turn-based mode, they are fought automatically and play out a bit like Risk (tilted towards the player or PC on Easy and Hard difficulty modes, respectively). Train raids and fort attacks can be fought in offensive or defensive roles and are first-person shooters in real-time mode. While fort attacks slightly favor the defender, train raids greatly favor the attacker in terms of difficulty in real-time mode. In turn-based mode, these battles are decided randomly the strength of the attacking army.

One can merge multiple armies together to make a bigger army, which when real-time battles are on basically means that your units are reinforced when defeated. In turn-based mode, the size of the army affects their success rate in army battles, train raids and fort attacks. What is unfortunate is that the size of the army in real-time mode has no affect on its ability to conduct train raids and fort attacks, meaning that a devastated army is just as capable as a huge one in making these kinds of forays.

Unfortunately the game seems to have a number of bugs. Several “items” for sale in turn-based mode have no effect other than taking your money. Sometimes you cannot give a command on the game map, only going into the options or quitting the game solves the problem.

There also is only one map, and it’s not too big. The game could be better if there were more maps, like different variations of forts and territory counts.