Unfortunately, there’s not much more to be had in
Squad Leader’s gameplay. It’s a poor man’s
X-COM, and although it fixes the one major problem I had with said game -- thrown weapons -- everything else is done so weakly as to more than diminish the game.
Squad Leader doesn’t pick you up from the get-go, and it never really gets much better. What we should have gotten was a tight, tactical World War II game. What we got instead is a muddled mess.
In Squad Leader, you command a number of “squads” (and I put it in quotes because five soldiers is an element, not a squad) in various battles. You can choose from three campaigns -- the Americans, the British, and the Germans -- and although there are certainly differences in the campaign missions and units, those differences are generally superficial.
The game itself is turn-based strategy. Each unit has a certain number of points to spend per turn, and you can spend them how ever you like. There are some rather neat things you can do like crawl along the ground or drop into a kneeling position for a better chance to hit someone.
But problems start to crop up in the training mission, and only compound from there. Why can you see enemies sometimes and not others when there’s no visible change in elevation? I don’t know. Why is it near-impossible to click on a unit to select them, especially if they’re on a hill? I don’t know. Why do running units move at roughly the same speed as walking units, which is to say, why is everything so freaking slow? I don’t know.
It’s as if the game is half-baked rather than fully done. There are some nice features, and using a grenade well is ultimately pleasing. But the choppy movements, arbitrary LOS algorithm, and horrendous movement rate will make you tear your hair out.
