StrategyFront Gaming

Taking the War East: Red Dragon

Wargame: Red Dragon is the third game in the Wargame series developed by Eugen Systems and published by Focus Home Interactive. First off, I’m not sure how to label this game, is it a real-time strategy game or a wargame? Is there even a difference?

Unlike other RTS games, there’s no base building here. Instead, the game uses a deck-building card game system where you can choose from over 1,900 different units and 17 separate factions.

I don’t even know where to begin.

Each of the astounding 1,900 is given a massive amount of detail. It’s painfully clear how much the developers love their tanks, guns, and choppers. 

Having 1,900 units pretty much kills any attempt to fact check them on accuracy. But from what I’ve seen they’ve done well and clearly care deeply about the subject matter.

The game follows up on the previous Wargame entries: AirLand Battle and European Escalation. Other Eugen titles follow with similar mechanics such as R.U.S.E., and the Steel Division series, both set during World War II.

Wargame: Red Dragon acts more as an expansion to Wargame: AirLand Battle even though it’s being sold as a stand-alone game. The main draw of Wargame: Red Dragon is the inclusion of naval combat. 

Setting of Wargame: Red Dragon

Wargame: Red Dragon is set during an alternate history of the Cold War when the superpowers of the world decided to go to war in the 1980s.

Red Dragon specifically focuses on the Asian theatre with China, Japan, and Korea being notable inclusions since AirLand battle. 

The setting isn’t really explored further than that in the game. It’s really there to act as a stage for all the “what if” scenarios of modern war. What would an American-Chinese conflict look like in the 1980s as opposed to the 1950s.

While the lack of any sort of flavor is definitely disappointing is understandable as we dive deeper into the focus of the game.

Tutorial, or lack thereof

For players familiar with the series, Wargame: Red Dragon will act more as an expansion to AirLand battle than a truly new game. All the controls, unit functions, and mechanics are mostly the same.

The problem arises for players new to the series trying to learn the game. Anyone trying to figure out how everything works are in for a rude surprise.

Wargame: Red Dragon has the distinction of having the worst tutorial for an extremely intricate strategy game.

It amounts to just a few pages of text with some images tacked on for reference. Just to reiterate this game has 1900 units, that’s by any definition, quite a lot. 

Not having some system to teach new players the complicated balance of gameplay before throwing them in is disastrous for the game. Especially since this game focuses heavily on its multiplayer component. 

This is especially annoying since the previous entry, AirLand Battle, had a tutorial. Note that it wasn’t a very good tutorial but it taught you the basics of the game. 

Campaign in Wargame: Red Dragon

Wargame: Red Dragon’s campaign scenarios are also somewhat lackluster. 

The campaigns take place on a strategic meta-map where you’ll move units around, fighting the AI and conquering territory. 

The campaign is akin to a risk map where you can either play battles out on the tactical maps or auto-resolve them.

This is definitely no Total War campaign and feels more like an afterthought. The campaigns take place around several scenarios in the “Cold War gone Hot” setting of the 1980s.

Scenarios seem stripped straight out of previous conflicts in the region. The Korean scenario starts with the Western forces in the Pusan Pocket waiting for American assistance… in 1984. There’s even another Inchon Landing and everything. 

The Hong Kong scenario sees UK/European forces defending the city from a Chinese assault. In a similar manner to the Imperial Japanese invasion during World War II.

Of course, these are just vehicles to allow you to play out these conflicts with modern weapons systems. But not even trying to come up with something new is a bit shallow.

Also disappointing is the removal of the RUSE cards from AirLand battles campaign. These would be special cards that could change the balance of the campaign map. Such as paralyzing all the units in a certain region.

These are gone in Wargame: Red Dragon and I can’t figure out why. 

Now you have no reason to ever hold troops back, you’ll want to deploy them immediately. Unlike in AirLand Battle where you want to keep some in reserve in case of an unexpected card. 

The campaign AI struggles with the endlessly complex warfare system. The AI’s main strategy is a mad rush towards any of your units that are not concealed. 

This allows you to bait with some cheap units out in the open then crush the AI. Even without these cheap tactics, the AI is a pushover. 

Wargame: Red Dragon requires careful handling of combined armies where the slightest unit out of position can unravel your whole strategy. It’s difficult for me to keep everything together so I don’t bash the AI too much.

Further, you can’t fight multiplayer campaigns against other players. This seems like a huge missed opportunity since the campaign is already present in the game.

Not having to deal with the incompetent AI and actually playing these scenarios against other players would have gone a long way towards making the campaigns better. 

You might say that the campaigns act as a tutorial for the player. Which is partially true as it’s really just there to prepare you for where the heart of the game lies: multiplayer. 

Combat

Wargame: Red Dragon’s tutorial and campaigns are disappointments so what’s good? Well, in short: war.

Where Wargame: Red Dragon succeeds is in its core tactical combat. With all the units to choose from, multiple factions and sub-factions. There’s a huge amount of variety in how you customize your army. 

You can choose to be either the Western-aligned Powers or Communist-aligned and have access to all the units from the countries in them. This gives you a huge variety to choose from when customizing your loadout.

Or you can narrow your focus down and specialize your army to one country and perhaps a specific style of play. This will grant you some bonuses for your narrower focus and make your army a more cohesive force. 

It also rewards experimentation with new armies, forcing players outside their comfort zone as they try to adapt to both their enemies’ setup and the terrain. 

It adds a great level of depth to the deck-building side of the game and makes your unit choices feel significant. 

Combat itself is incredibly complex. By getting rid of all base-building and economic aspects of most RTS games Wargame: Red Dragon can focus on doing war well.

This is critical since in a lot of RTS games like Age of Empires or Starcraft, whoever wins the economic and technological race will end up winning the military victory.

In Wargame: Red Dragon it’s all about your tactics and skill at maneuver warfare. It’s less about units finding their hard counters and more about careful positioning and recon spotting for your longer-range projectiles.

It’s a game of intelligence more than brute-forcing your opponents with recon units being especially important to spot for artillery. Although artillery seems to have been somewhat nerfed from AirLand battle which is great since artillery barrages were too effective in that title.

Often whoever will see the enemy first and acts on it will win the engagement. With a variety of units, there are unlimited potential strategies that you can employ.

The developers have continued to support the game throughout the years by adding free DLC with new factions and their appropriate units.

One example is the addition of the Nordic countries to the game. This continued to bring the astonishing number of units to even greater heights.

The main factions feel appropriately unique. For example, China has cheap and effective infantry to overwhelm the enemy, while the United Kingdom focuses far more on highly effective special operations units. 

The US has powerful air and naval capabilities while the USSR sports incredibly effective helicopter units.

This just adds more to the depth of army composition and how you can specialize in your force. But it’s good to know that even with these specializations there are no super units. Any units can be destroyed if caught out of position. 

Specialization can be especially important in multiplayer as the hectic 10 v. 10 matches require teammates to work together to achieve victory. These matches can be insane as you’re both trying to coordinate with 9 other players and effectively direct your own forces.

Multiplayer is still mostly active although it’s sometimes hard to find 1 v. 1 matches, which are good for new players. Once you get more experienced with the game I recommend jumping into a 10 v. 10 and seeing what beautiful chaos ensues. 

Multiplayer is where the game really shines. 

Naval Combat

What about the newest addition to Wargame: Red Dragon, the naval combat? Well, it’s not great.

To be fair, most games don’t handle modern naval combat well, especially ones that also include land combat. 

The main problem is scale. Land combat takes place at a range of miles apart, while naval combat takes place at hundreds of miles apart. Translating between these two is often disastrous. 

The way Wargame: Red Dragon deals with this is by making the naval combat range comically close. Instead of guided missiles cruising hundreds of miles to their destination, they’ll be cruising barely a few hundred feet.

It often feels like my ships should be delivering broadsides to the enemy from tall-masted ships. This makes the battles which are open sea battles terrible, as you’ll need to get so close to the enemy that all tactics are out the window. 

The naval combat works much better when paired with land combat. Sending gunboats up a river to flank the enemy or using ships to support a coastal assault all work well and feel like naval combat should. 

Another thing to note is that naval units seem to shred air units to pieces meaning it’s difficult to deal with them besides bringing your own naval forces to bear.  

None of this means naval combat in Red Dragon can’t be fun, it often still is, as the naval units generally look amazing. It non-realistic portrayal of warfare on the high seas is just at odds with its relatively realistic portrayal of land combat.

Conclusion

Wargame: Red Dragon is a great wargame but its selling point, naval warfare, falls flat, and anything outside of multiplayer is a bust. I wouldn’t recommend this game to new players without a tutorial although there are greatly detailed Youtube video guides and Steam Guides. 

Wargame: Red Dragon is still a great modern wargame but it doesn’t deliver on everything it sets out to and stumbles where it’s previous entry didn’t. 

The game looks beautiful even zoomed in. Seeing your units torn apart by highly-detailed explosions is something to behold. 

The detailed and expansive list of modern combat units is going to be a huge draw for some people.

Although I sometimes felt that in practice the difference between two units of the same type wasn’t all that great. And the learning curve from having to choose between all these units could turn some new players off.  

Still, I can’t recommend multiplayer enough, if you’re looking for deep strategic combat with modern arms then this is the game for you.

There’s nothing like seeing your units annihilate an enemy out of position or the feeling of the massive tank battles which ensue on open maps. 

If you enjoyed our article on Wargame: Red Dragon and wanted to purchase the game, please consider doing so through our Affiliate Link on G2A.com. When using this link we receive a commission that helps us keep writing strategy game content! Thank you for your support!

If you’d like to purchase: Wargame: Red Dragon on G2A.com