The Chinese are still shaking off their Maoist hangover, and their military lags behind the Soviets in some key areas. Warsaw Pact battles of the previous games. A campaign covering a Chinese surprise attack on the Soviets in 1979 is a completely different ballgame from the NATO vs. Red Dragon also has some nice variety that comes with its Asian setting. Plus, it's great fun turning Kim Il-Sung's army into scrap metal. It's entirely lopsided thanks to the Communists' numbers and a time limit on campaign objectives, and it's a good way to give newcomers a manageable task. Playing as the South Korean / US side, you start with a defensive stand using top-shelf Western hardware against North Korea's older equipment.
The new campaigns in Red Dragon are mostly good, and they do a nice job of easing you in with a short campaign covering a hypothetical second Korean War. There are also riverine units that can provide some help further inland. Those ships make a lot more sense when they're working as support for the land forces, and whoever wins the battle at sea will win control of the coast. Naval units work better when they're a part of a struggle along a coastline. The sight of 20th century guided-missile cruisers drawing within pistol range of one another and going broadside for a broadside is amazing, but deeply silly and at odds with the cat-and-mouse tension that makes the rest of Wargame so good. On ocean maps, where only warships can do battle, it's only too evident that Wargame’s design was never meant to handle the long-range scale of modern naval combat. It's a good thing everything looks so good, because that's the main attraction of the naval combat. Wargame's atmosphere is something to savor in small doses, but you can't take your eyes off the big picture for long. Most of the time, you'll play from a position far above the action, pushing unit icons around a command map. Unfortunately, Wargame doesn't really let you savor the show. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, high on his own supply of destructive power. Watching it, it's easy to sympathize with Robert Duvall's Col. Forests catch fire in the wake of napalm strikes, missiles criss-cross in the sky above your troops, and aircraft engage in intense dogfights while a tank column vanishes in a cloud of helicopter rocket fire. Red Dragon, more than any prior Wargame, delivers on the spectacle. It's intensely satisfying to figure out your opponent's entire position and strategy, just from a few stray clues and a gut feeling. You are the conductor of a combat orchestra: recon units reveal traps, artillery suppresses enemy positions, then tanks and infantry to storm forward while helicopters and aircraft provide overwatch.
On the other hand, this also makes for an amazing series of mind games. Not only do things go wrong quickly, but they can trigger cascades of failure. That's its best and most polarizing feature, because it can be inordinately frustrating when things go against you. This is not a game about reaction, but anticipation and inference. A tank-killing missile crew celebrates their victory from its hiding place inside a forest… and then a pair of jets cover the forest in cluster bombs and kill everything inside it. A missile streaks out from a treeline and the greatest tank in your army is gone. It is a game where even your best units can be snuffed out in a heartbeat, and leave you without a clue as to what just happened. That gives Wargame a distinctive character. That means that vision is everything: the first side to spot the enemy can get the favorable matchups that will turn a battle into a slaughter. The Wargame series has always been about vulnerability, in that every type of unit is specifically designed to kill another type of unit.
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