Much as I like the base building of many real time strategy titles such as the Command and Conquer series, it's a comical concept:
“Right chaps, we need to destroy this enemy base, so we're going to land a building team nearby, build a military base, and then start training some cannon fod... er, crack soldiers and build some tanks. The enemy won't know what hit them.”
“Won't we need a lot of supplies to do that?”
“No, we'll be landing with a minimal amount of supplies, and mining what we need there. We'll also need power, so we'll be constructing a grid of nuclear power plants too.”
“How long is this all supposed to take?”
“About three hours... Hmm.”

At the same time, entirely historically accurate strategy games are a little dry for all but the military buffs – since the middle of the 19th century and the advent of accurate long range weaponry and then air to ground ordnance most people involved in a war spend 99% of the time hiding.

On each mission you start with a set number of units, but are able to call on reinforcements at regular periods. You can choose how you want your reinforcements, be it a unit of light tanks, heavy tanks, infantry, or perhaps you want to call on your bombers to do some damage. But you only get one unit - a ‘unit’ being two groups of twelve infantry men, or four light tanks, or three medium tanks etc - and once you've called on your reinforcements you'll have to wait a few minutes until you can call for more. To stop you cheating and stockpiling your reinforcements you only get a limited number of reinforcements for each mission, as well as a total for the whole sub-campaign. As you progress through the campaign you get more types of reinforcements to call upon, and your existing types of units will gain experience and be able to perform new actions; tanks will be able to fire while moving; bombers will be able to fly in bad weather; infantry will be able to dig trenches. It certainly keeps the game moving as you constantly have new units and tactics available to you.

The music and sound really capture the battlefield feel well – tanks are carried into battle on the crest of a booming orchestral score, while the general babble of the units in their native language is nice, but occasionally infuriating – more than once I was baffled why a tank wasn't moving until I realised that the unit was saying that he couldn't get to where I wanted, but in German. After that point I became infuriatingly well acquainted with the German for 'I cannot get there Sir' as the mass movement of units in Blitzkrieg 2 is plagued by the old RTS problem of bad pathfinding. It's not helped by the fact that units will not get out of the way of another one’s path, causing them to take a long and often dangerous route around obstacles as well as their allies. Worst of all was when I was moving across a bridge – I moved five tanks across with another five to go when an allied AI unit decided to go half way across the bridge and stop, blocking the only crossing point for my remaining tanks. Although I took control of the other side of the bridge with my five units, the AI unit wasn't budging, and I had to resort to some friendly fire to remove the barricade (It would be an interesting letter home to the family of the deceased for that incident: “Dear Sir, We are deeply saddened to tell you that your Son was killed because he wouldn't move his tank out of the bloody way...”. Having said that, the pathfinding issues weren't insurmountable, and were really the only gameplay problem I found.