Battleplan: the best strategy idea of the year, sold at thirty euros without the early access label

There is a Battleplan review that ends on a sentence I cannot shake.

After listing the clunky interface, the tutorial crashes and the units that stop responding to orders, the player adds: for some reason, the devs chose not to launch this as an early access title.

Thirty euros and forty-nine cents. No label. No warning.

That is this game's whole tragedy, and it is all the more frustrating because the idea is excellent.

The idea, and it is genuinely new

Battleplan simulates month-long battles, with hundreds of thousands of troops, second by second and day by day.

But this is not a game where you move units.

You give high-level orders, then watch your officers and companies carry them out autonomously.

And the way you give those orders is the find: you draw directly on the map. Multi-step, multi-unit plans, built intuitively with a pencil. Defence in depth, a counterattack, a planned withdrawal. A preparatory bombardment before a set-piece assault, then splitting the division to take two objectives at once.

The army itself is modelled properly: headquarters, regiments, battalions, companies. Infantry, tanks, engineers, anti-tank guns, artillery and scouts working together without you clicking them one at a time.

And there is a layer I adore: you hire and fire the officers of your divisions. You listen to their advice, or you do not. And if you keep them alive, they gain veterancy and quirks.

Generals who develop quirks. In a strategy game. Somebody at that studio has read war memoirs.

What it produces when it works

A player with twelve hours writes the best possible defence of this game, and I am borrowing it because it is accurate.

You know the saying about plans never surviving contact with the enemy? If you want to live out that phrase, this is the game for you.

He describes the real pleasure: coordinating a front to press an advantage, then sleuthing out why something did not work. That is exactly what conventional strategy never offers, because there you control everything and a failure is always a misclick.

Here, you designed a plan, you handed it to people, and they did their best. The post-mortem becomes part of the game.

Another player sums up the title's position: somewhere between Hearts of Iron and a regular real-time strategy game. That is a slot nobody occupies.

And now the list

75 positive reviews out of 116. A mixed reception. Here is why, and it is specific.

The crashes. One player reports a crash every other planning phase, forcing him to quicksave every three or four minutes and relaunch every ten. Another describes a memory leak: the game eats RAM until the operating system kills it.

The performance. A player with five hours writes that the game is really fun, that he loves making a plan and seeing how it turns out, and that his frame rate is terrible with constant stutter whenever he adjusts an existing plan. He stopped at the fourth mission.

Read that last point carefully: the slowdown arrives precisely when you use the game's main mechanic.

The mission-breaking bugs. Enemy occupation markers that will not disappear after you destroy the battalions concerned, or that reappear elsewhere. The result: a city you were meant to hold changes status for no reason.

And the tutorial. At least one player could not finish it, with units ceasing to respond to orders.

The real subject

I am not going to tear this game down, because that would be unfair and beside the point.

Every negative review I have just quoted, without exception, is written by somebody who likes the game. They all say the same thing: the idea is brilliant, there is nothing comparable, come back in three weeks.

One player puts it perfectly: give it two to three weeks before buying, hopefully it will be completely playable by then.

So the problem is not the game's quality, it is the decision to sell it at thirty euros as a finished release when it is visibly in the state of a promising early access build.

The early access label is not a shame. It is a contract: you pay less, you know it is unfinished, and you take part. By skipping it here, the studio turned people who would have been enthusiastic testers into disappointed buyers.

So here is my advice, and it is not a dodge.

Put Battleplan on your wishlist today. The idea of drawing a plan and handing it to officers with their own quirks is the most interesting thing strategy has produced this year, and there is no equivalent.

And buy it in a month, once the crashes are sorted, or on sale.

Today's score penalises a product sold at full price in a state that should not have been sold at full price. It says nothing about what this game will be in January, and I fully intend to come back to it.

Got a plan that failed magnificently? That is precisely what this game does best, tell us on the InsertCoins Discord.