Hearts of Iron III

Game Info

Publisher: Paradox Interactive

Developer: Paradox Interactive

Genre(s): Real-Time Strategy

Players: 2

ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10 and Older)

Release Date: August 7, 2009

Summary

Play as any nation from 1936 to1948 with more than 150 countries to choose from. More than 10,000 land provinces makes this game five times more detailed than Hearts of Iron 2 and the most detailed depiction of World War 2 ever made. Control the oceans with aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships. Use your air force to defend the skies, support naval and ground forces, and bomb your enemies. Customize your divisions in detail with more than 20 types of brigades.New economic system makes it possible to buy weapons overseas. Mobilization and reserves gives the option of surprise attacks. A completely new intelligence system makes it possible to get information about enemy reserves and troop movements.Assign troops to theatres on the map to fight two-front wars more successfully. Thousands of historically accurate real-world military commanders and politicians. Realistic military command AI with unprecedented levels of interaction. In-depth diplomatic and political system. [Paradox Interactive]

Cheat Codes & Hints: Cheat Code Central

Also On The Web: Official Website

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

What Our Users Said

Vote Now! The average user rating for this game is 6.4 (out of 10) based on 74 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Max L gave it a0:
The game would not run well at all on my machine, even though it's a pretty decent machine that runs some very high end games, and is well within the specs for the game. After a short time it became completely unplayable. I'm glad some other folks are enjoying it since it is certainly a game with some potential, but it's bizarre to me that some users give it a perfect 10 and then talk about it having severe bugs. HOI 2 is a terrific game, but my advice here is to pass on this woefully inclomplete pice of software. Perhaps it can be fixed. Given that each new patch has broken something else, I have my doubts.

MarcoC V gave it a1:
Huge beta test, the latest release (1.2) is still unplayable (unless you think is funny to spend tens of hours on a game that you'll not be able to reload since crashes to desktop are very common). Paradox is planning to release another patch but won't commit to a date (quote from the forum : "I do not want to promise a date [for the next patch] as I rather want it to be 99.999% polished at release".) The game is simply unplayable in the current state.

Lucian gave it an8:
Once again Paradox have delivered an absoulutly emense game in both sheer physical size and depth. The learning curve for those new to the series has been flattend, although the game still demands a lot of the player the effort to reward ratio is very well matched. It can be said that palying with history is fun and Hearts of Iron 3 makes it so. Hats off to Paradox for delivering a game ON TIME and well developed.

Hans gave it a5:
Another game in the line of Europa Universalis 3 and Rome. This publisher releases unfinished games and expects the users to fix them. This game lacks any sense of realism. I am not talking about logical bugs, but who woud expect that Ireland would disembark alone on the german coast? Who would expect Argentina did the same on england? As it is, the game should not be sold linked to WW2, but instead in creating an alternative reality that has very few to do with WW2, at least if one wants to play the full campaign. This publisher got lucky with Europa Universalis 3, when a group of users coded Magna Mundi and solved most of the faults. They had no such luck with Rome, because the Magna Mundi team was not interested in fixing it. And probably they are now praying the Magna Mundi team will fix HOI3. This is terrible, because these games have lots of potential.

Wim H gave it a6:
This version is the first I play so I cant compare with series 1 and 2. Though I have to say that the game detail is impressive and is a platform for a great game. Unfortunately thats it for me, as I cant say I enjoy it. Maybe I need to play longer and go through the learning curve, but there are some things that just dont appeal to me such as: there are certain political leaders you cant change. Some countries are almost impossible to change the general democracy level which makes it impossible to switch sides (allies vs axis). Depending on the research available only some countries can eg. get to the nuclear weapons. A.I on resources does often give insufficient to consumer goods, which increases revolt automatically. etc etc. Although officially this is not a retelling of Word war 2, a lot of things are programmed to happen as they did. No surprises and a lot of details to manage to get to the same result. I hope I am wrong but this is my feeling after playing around 5 seperate attempts.

Andreas L gave it a10:
This game has the potential to become the greatest strategy game ever. Right now, it has some severe bugs, and the AI needs tweaking, but Paradox is working hard to iron out all the bugs.

John P gave it a3:
There is a special feeling one gets when they pay $39.99 to participate in a public beta test, to which HOI3's developer, Paradox Interactive, has invited its paying customers. PI has a reputation for releasing games before they are finished, and they have fully lived up to it. Following on the heels of HoI2, which had several expansions, HoI3 totally redesigns their game from the ground up. If you are familiar with its predecessors, you will be mostly familiar with the latest iteration. From an aesthetic perspective, the game actually looks fairly good, and it is playable in high resolution (works fine on my HD TV monitor). My system is upper-end, and I have not had many issues with regular graphic processing, although many users have expressed concerns on the PI forums about performance. If anything could be said for the graphic design, it is that the map looks nihilistic. It is washed out with muted earth tones that one might joke were the remains of the world at the end of HoI2: Armageddon. I won't mince words. It is just an ugly map. The biggest problems with HoI3 lie with its incompleteness and obvious premature release. It is a very complex game. Yet for all its, frankly, absurd over-complexity and obsession with minute detail, the game allows for such ahistorical and contra-logical events as Japan joining the Allies, the US joining the Axis, etc. Some of the Design Changes: The size of the world in terms of playable areas has jumped by over a factor of 10, to over 14,000. This necessitated a change to their ground unit rules, which are now more complex, but conceptually good ideas. The unit purchase menus are different, especially for land units. Instead of buying a division and perhaps attaching a brigade, you construct brigades and assemble them into divisions. There are some quirks built into the game that make juggling brigades between divisions just plain annoying (you have to remove a leader from a 2-brigade division before you can break it down into separate brigades, for example). You will spend a great deal of time fighting the system to get your divisions set up the way you want them, but you have much more flexibility. IMO, this is a good change, but the niggling playability issues need to be addressed. The research has been altered (in my mind, improved), but like everything else HoI, it is overly complex. Do nations really need to research separate Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship, and Aircraft Carrier technology chains? Or is that just a mechanism to give you something else on which to drag out your research? Do you really need to research Light Cruiser Crew Training to learn to use Carrier Task Forces? Or is that just an excuse for you to spend points on light cruiser technology? Do you really need to research anti-aircraft technology for every class of ship in the game? Or is that just a time sink? IMO, the way tech has been changed is good, but the details of the implementation are not logical. The game has implemented a wide variety of AI management routines for all aspects of the game. And as with any AI in any Complex game, you'll never use it because it can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before you ever notice that it's doing something totally stupid (for example, during the battle of France, my German AI pulled a quarter of my divisions out of contact and parked them deep inside Germany on Victory Point zones instead of using them to break the French lines). As with anything, the more complicated the design, the harder it is for an AI to respond well. "Bugs, Mr. Rico! Zillions of 'em!" Or, in many cases, bad design decisions. If you are very successful (and your production goes very high), the Production screen will begin to lag out to the point where, even on fast systems, you may need to wait up to a minute or longer before you can click anything. To the best of my ability to judge, this seems to be because of optimization errors. Every time you revisit the main screen (e.g., every time you place a unit into your production queue, you must return here), the game recalculates and redisplays your convoy routes and your production values. This will park your system, leaving you to ponder whether or not the application has locked up. Every. Time. You. Open. The. Unit. Production. Window. Diplomacy is broken. Any time you begin the game as Germany, if you follow historical precedent, every country not directly aligned with you or the Comintern will join the Allies about the time you get around to invading France. Part of the reason for this gameplay bug is an obvious lack of playtesting prior to release. Other reasons include an AI mechanic called "threat" and another that governs "alignment" between the three major power blocs (Axis, Allies, Comintern). The in-game mechanics are unacceptably unrealistic, and frankly, just plain silly. Partisan implementation is silly. Yes. Silly. In occupied territories, about once a week (5.8% chance times every province you control), a partisan brigade will spawn randomly and start running as fast as it can to change control of other provinces. In the entirity of the war, such forces might have sprung into being once a year (and I think that's an exaggeration). This sub-system will turn your games into a distracting Whack-a-mole partisan hunt that does nothing except detract from your fun. Your police and garrison units will not do anything to prevent partisans from appearing. But two brigades of them will always stomp a partisan unit out of existence, assuming you can catch it. The game moves slower than a one-legged ant in a barrel of molasses. I began a game as Germany in 1936. Four days later, I am finally in 1940, and that is playing at least 6 to 8 hours a day. According to the forums, the save game feature might corrupt in 1941, so I'll need to wait on the next patch before playing further. Of course, in 1940, I just finished conquering the Netherlands East Indies and the Belgian Congo. As Germany. Now, one of the reasons for that was a bug in the saved game process. I went to sleep at war with France and England and the rest of the 160 Allied nations I had honked off by conquering Poland in 1936. And the Baltic States. Etc. When I reloaded the game the next morning, with my divisions having just cracked the Maginot line by direct assault, lo and behold! I was no longer at war with the Allies. In fact, the Allies, Axis, and Comintern had all ceased to exist as diplomatic entities, and I was in a truce with everyone. So I immediately declared war again on France just to see what would happen. From that point, the diplomacy was so broken that it never recovered. Oh, and Luxembourg still refuses to surrender, despite having no units and no territory. Apparently, I need to spend espionage points on "lowering its national unity" first. Conclusions There are so many problems I have seen with HoI3 so far that I can't list them without writing a novel. Like HoI2, HoI3 may eventually become a playable game, and if tweaked to reduce some of the absurd ahistoricity that arises from the working-as-designed diplomacy engine, it might be worth your effort. As it was releases, this is an incomplete game, and even if it was complete, it would still be flawed in that it is overly complex for an open-ended fantasy game about the WWII years, and hopelessly unrealistic for a conflict simulation. It truly is an ambitions project, and I'll go so far as to say it's an amazing application. But it's currently (version 1.1c) broken beyond all reason. Until it is fixed (meaning until Paradox finally releases a release candidate), I suggest avoiding it like the swine flu.

Read more user comments >