I became a fan of the new style stealth-focus RTS games due to Shadow Tactics but unfortunately the developer Minimi Games is no more. I’ll probably get around to playing their last pirate-themed game at some point but in the meantime here’s a World War 2-themed game in the same vein by a different developer. This one is much more combat focused and features a base management component in between missions.

The story takes places during Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union so you’re in charge of a group of partisans operating behind enemy lines. They’re led by Commander Zorin who is captured by the Germans but manages to escape from the prisoner of war camp with Sergeant Fetisov, a soldier in his unit. They are soon joined by Sanek, a young boy from the nearby village, who leads them to a hunting camp deep in the woods. From there, they operate as an independent partisan group, doing their best to sabotage German operations behind enemy lines. They rescue other captured soldiers to add to their ranks, are joined by the hunter who built the camp in the first place and even receive official recognition of sorts by a Commissar. As their operations grow bolder, blowing up bridges and softening up a railway station for an air strike, the Germans ramp up the hunt for them as well by deploying SS soldiers against them.

With the WW2 setting and it being about fighting against Nazi Germany, I’d expected a fair amount of patriotic chest-thumping as part of the story. What I didn’t expect was how conflicted I felt about the partisans talking the fight against fascists and defending the motherland in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The voice acting is in Russian and the partisans all have realistic backstories from that era. They make it absolutely clear in their dialogue that Ukraine is very much part of the motherland that they are defending. Also, at no point do they ever mention any other theatre of the war. It’s all only ever about the Nazis against the Soviets. It’s a relatively minor thing maybe but it was disquieting to me to be playing on the side of the Russians here.

I won’t go into all of the stealth-based mechanics that are familiar from the titles made by Minimi Games. From the double-layered vision cones of the guards, the little ripples to indicate how far sound travels, to the large zones that dogs are able to smell, they’re all here. Many of the distraction tools are also similar but in Partisans 1941 any of your partisans can use any tools or weapons. So anyone can pick up and throw a rock to create noise or place a bottle of liquor on the ground to attract thirsty guard. Even so your partisans are differentiated by their skill trees which unlock unique abilities for them. So the criminal Morosov is the only character to be able to whistle to draw attention, Zorin is the only one who is able to throw knives and so on. The partisans also differ in how quickly they are able to move, to carry bodies and to carry loot.

One thing I quickly noticed is that while the games by Minimi are always very polished with levels that carefully constructed and mechanics that follow predictable rules, Partisans 1941 is sloppy and often janky. The distraction tricks might or might not work and you won’t know until you try. The simple routines of the guards can often break when an alert is raised and they might not be able to get back to what they were doing afterwards. There are also niggling interface issues so when you click to have a partisan loot a body, you sometimes end up picking the body up and vice versa. There’s not much documentation so you mostly pick things up through trial and error. The graphics and overall production quality are similarly mediocre. It’s war so you have drab colors and not much prettiness. The levels are logically laid out but nothing exceptional.

What this also means is that you don’t get the intricate, multi-layered puzzles of the Minimi games which often require coordinating simultaneous actions by multiple characters. Here a single partisan specializing in stealth is capable of soloing a fair portion of the map by working patiently. For the hard parts, it’s time to bring in the rest of the team and go loud. There are a few scenarios in which being detected is an instant fail in some sections. But in this game, combat is expected and normal. Your partisans are badly outnumbered of course so you first silently pick off individual stragglers, then surround the remaining enemies from advantageous positions and launch your attack. In this way, it’s actually easier than most games in this genre as you can always resort to combat when needed. There is unfortunately one exception in the case of the scenario in which you have to defend against multiple waves of attackers coming from different directions. I found that one very tough and chaotic and won mostly through luck.

The overall story is about what you’d expect. At various points you get to blow up a bridge, break into a prison and assassinate plenty of Nazi commanders. In between missions you’re at the camp where you must assign them jobs to gather food, construct buildings or embark on minor operations. These are resolved automatically and success is determined by who you assign to the operations, gaining you resources like ammunition, experience points and morale. It feels a little stressful at the beginning that you have to worry about getting enough food for your partisans and as your ranks grow, so does the food requirements. But I found that the game is rather forgiving with resources so long as you’re diligent about scouring the map for resources during missions. At no point was no partisans ever at risk of actually starving and it soon felt like the camp management section was just make-work with no meaningful decisions to be made.

Anyway I was sorely disappointed by how simplistic the stealth gameplay is. The novelty of the combat makes up for it for a little while but it gets old as your partisans are fragile and it’s all about flanking. Weirdly enough the most dangerous enemies by far are the dogs who can sniff you out of hiding places and can take down your partisans very quickly. For some strange reason, your partisans will never shoot dogs on their own even when they’re charging right at them so you always have to manually direct them to do so. I was disappointed that you usually only get to take three partisans into missions. Sometimes you get a fourth one when you meet someone new to recruit but that’s it. I believe that this limits the complexity of the infiltration and tactical scenarios that they can include in the scenarios. The game is short enough that you will likely never get to meaningfully use several of the partisans under this low limit.

As I never did play the Commandos games that kicked off this style of RTS, I thought this might scratch that particular itch. I guess it did at that because I’ve had quite enough of killing Nazis in World War 2. With its combat focus, guns and camp management, this is distinctively different from the ones made by Minimi. But it markedly inferior in just about every aspect with janky mechanics, levels that are plain uninteresting and even its Russian identity. There’s more content here in the form of the optional missions but I chose to skip them as I’ve had enough of what it has to offer in the main campaign. To the next game!