Turn-based tactical games are a dying breed since most gamers just prefer real-time combat. These days, a turn-based combat has to blow away expectations to be good (like Baldur’s Gate 3). Most other games in the genre that do not meet the high expectations often fly under the radar.
So while my expectations were low for the new, generic-looking WW2 title Classified: France ’44, I was genuinely surprised after giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Dropped Into No Man’s Land
The story starts with three soldiers from different backgrounds dropping into France over Nazi territory. Two soldiers, Willard Cassidy and Tom King, manage to land nearby while Vincent Tremblay gets separated.
Willard and Tom decide to hold up in a small house in the fields nearby, which is where the tutorial begins after Nazi’s come looking for them. Right off the bat, the game prioritizes teaching you stealth kills, which makes sense as it is just two soldiers outnumbered by multiple enemies.
Here the game introduces its Ambush mechanic. Once you defeat a certain number of enemies in stealth without detection, you get an Ambush turn where you can open fire on them without them getting a chance to take cover. Meanwhile, you also get an accuracy buff on your characters.
I am a big XCOM 2 fan and will go as far as to say it’s one of my top 5 games. But the one thing I genuinely miss having in that game is proper stealth mechanics and missions. Some of the DLC stuff in XCOM 2 added some degree of stealth stuff, but Classified: France ’44 does this surprisingly well right from the get-go.
The tutorial was quite linear and literally pointed out the exact tile I needed to move my soldiers to. I prefer when games just drop you into the world and let you figure things out with the use of intuitive design and UI. The more obvious approach can only be excused if the game has some unique mechanics that require proper explanation.
The Overworld Of A Classified France
Once the tutorial mission was done, I was thrown into an overview map of France and its territories. I could see which territories are controlled by which allied factions and how many days are left until D-day occurs. This is very similar to the overworld of XCOM 2; it even had the imminent doomsday timer that you had to manage.
You can also head to Basecamp, which is simply a place for your soldiers to hang out around a campfire. Here you can choose to listen to their conversations, and doing so gives your soldiers a boost in morale. The conversations have nothing to do with gameplay other than the reward after it, but it adds a sense of immersion when hearing the banter between American and British soldiers.
Voice acting being present for each character rather than a generic voice for every soldier brings even more immersion as you start to recognize the voice of each of your soldiers. The sounds of the guns being shot when in combat and the nazi soldiers calling out danger are also pretty authentic and believable.
The game also has a Loadout screen where you can your soldiers’ inventory. You can change the primary gun, sidearm, grenade, knife, and more. You can also change the outfits for your characters, from jackets to helmets.
The next and final tab on the overview screen is the Factions tab. There are three factions in the game: Radicals, Gaullists, and Criminals. Doing missions inside the territory of a given faction increases your standing with that faction.
In the Factions tab, you can buy guns and equipment from the faction leaders. The more standing you have with them, the more items you are able to buy.
Deploying Into The Warzone
The game features three distinct types of missions:
- Assault drops you where the enemy has full knowledge of your presence
- Ambush drops you undetected and allows you to use the ambush mechanic to make yourself known.
- Stealth is a full stealth-kill-only mission where detection can cause you to be heavily outnumbered.
On top of this, in the mission briefing the game also tells you the type of tactics that will be required. These can differ between retrieval mission, rescue mission, bomb planting mission, etc. along with the corresponding environment, like urban, fields, etc. This means planning is key and allows you to perfectly chart your approach. You can select the best possible soldiers for the mission and the right pieces of equipment that you would need.
You also get to choose between multiple missions, each with its own rewards. This adds replayability to the game as you will not see all the missions in one playthrough. Sometimes you have to be forced to select a certain mission because the soldiers required for the other one are injured. This is a great mechanic that gives emphasis to your decisions as well as your mistakes.
Once you are on the mission and fighting against the Nazis, a neat thing you can do in Classified: France ’44 is that you can break your enemy’s morale. Enemies have a health bar and a morale bar; any type of attack on them, even if it misses, still lowers their morale.
Lowering an enemy’s morale below 50% makes them Suppressed and unable to move. Completely bringing this down to 0% puts them into a Broken state where they cannot take any actions whatsoever in their turn.
This gameplay mechanic works really well. One way I used this was by putting down an explosive satchel charge near an enemy with low morale. I then put him in a broken state by firing at him so that he won’t be able to run away from the satchel charge that explodes after 2 turns.
Other gameplay mechanics are similar to what you would find in XCOM, like putting your soldiers on overwatch behind a cover, shots having a percentile chance to hit based on distance and cover, etc.
By the way, if your soldier’s bullet trajectory has a friendly soldier within or nearby, then the friendly soldier will also have a chance to get hit. This means you have to carefully position your soldiers to avoid friendly casualties.
Is France Really This Small?
Now that I have gushed over everything that I like about Classified: France ’44, let’s get to the more disappointing parts.
The levels where you deploy for a mission feel quite small. The enemies and even the objectives are often right in front of you where you spawn. It gave me little to no room to set up and get a hold of my surroundings.
Here’s yet another comparison to XCOM: That game has way bigger levels that allow for a more open approach. I could choose which angle I wanted to come in from and set up my units in multiple advantageous positions on overwatch as I found out where the enemies were.
That is not the case with Classified: France ’44. There aren’t too many different ways to complete a given mission. I wish it was more open-ended to make it more challenging. The game often makes it incredibly obvious what you need to do, like having one enemy face away right at the start near you, just begging to be stealth killed.
If that is how the mission starts, then I am sure 9/10 people did the exact same move of using melee on the enemy in their first turn. Turn-based games are often challenging because you could make one wrong move and lose a lot due to it. But Classified: France ’44 is not as challenging, at least on the normal difficulty.
Games like XCOM 2 or even Baldur’s Gate 3 absolutely owned me in the first few combat encounters. They forced me to come up with a strategy and tactic rather than making it obvious what needed to be done.
Visually, France ’44 is decent, but it isn’t the best-looking game. Sometimes my immersion would be broken because of simple bugs like an enemy body disappearing as soon as my soldier melee killed them.
The audio design is done well, from the gunshots to the dialogues of the characters. But a lot of times my soldiers would keep repeating the same line over and over again. The game can also do with some more ambient sounds, but the soundtrack is fitting and works well.
Verdict
Classified: France ’44 takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of XCOM 2 and packages it in a World War 2 era. It does a lot of unique things that are missing from other games and brings a fresh new take on how a game with guns and soldiers can be done in a turn-based format.
If you dislike how challenging some of the turn-based combat games are, this one is the one for you.
Classified: France '44 takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of XCOM 2 and packages it in a World War 2 era.
The Good
- Good unique gameplay mechanics like the Morale and Ambush systems
- Actual full stealth turn-based combat missions
- Good voice acting
- Replayability with multiple mission choices
- Good customization elements
The Bad
- Small Level sizes
- Less open-ended combat design
- Subpar graphics
- Not very challenging
