Reviews

A famous product of the cold war in computer gaming, this strategic war game did its best to shock the player into a realization of the consequences of a third world war. It presented a very real life scenario, with the armies of the Warsaw Pact and NATO poised face to face along the east/west German border, armed to the teeth with tanks, planes, chemical weapons and nuclear bombs...and worse than that, ready to start operations against each other.

The gameplay was simple, joystick driven (and therefore not time consuming to learn) and it subsequently attracted gamers with little normal interest in the wargame genre.
A novelty when the game was released, was that it required of the player (before being allowed to drop the bomb) the calling of a onscreen telephone number, where a recorded message would announce (above the sounds of screams and explosions in the background) " If this is really what you want, the nuclear authorization code is ...Midnight Sun " Spooky stuff.

The game is unusual in also having an "arcade" section in a war game which can (apparently) influence the directions of battles. This however is a poor addition to the game, with the sub-game itself being of little entertainment. It can at least be turned off.
Another thing of note, is that although this game was released on the C64 first, the ability to play 2 players (1v1) was new on the Spectrum, with Commodore owners having NO option to nuke their best friends clean out of existence.
Letting the computer play against itself is also an interesting option they added, and one that kept me watching for quite some time.

I loved this back in the day, and continue to enjoy this game today. A great war game for non war gamers, alongside being a real piece of gaming (and cultural) history.

In the 1980s, there was significant paranoia about the final war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact - TV films such as the rather wishy-washy "The Day After", and the simply terrifying "Threads" were fresh in many people's minds, and in our parents generation, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN were all too recent.

This gave the game an all-too-real and chilling aspect, especially when you read the part about the Reflex system in the game´s instructions, and how it was modelled on a proposed NATO automatic response system.

The game is well-written - attention has been paid to the control system so it doesn't get in your way - if mice were popular when the game came out, it would have naturally fitted mouse control. As is the case in strategy (both games and real life) you need to allocate resources, plan your attack and defence, and think ahead about what the enemy might do. Theatre Europe also gives you a couple of more chilling options - the use of chemical or tactical nuclear attacks. Strangely, chemical attacks are limited to civilian targets, whereas tactical nuclear strikes can also be targeted on enemy military units. It also gives the option to use the "reflex" system to automatically retaliate when attacked with chemical or nuclear weapons. Finally, it also gives the option of using the "fire plan". These innocuous words mean an all out nuclear attack against your enemy. It's also the "instant lose" option, because the enemy will retaliate with their fire plan. Humanity doesn't get to survive the resulting six gigaton exchange.

The game also contains an "arcade mode" where you get to play out all the battles, but in contrast to the main strategy game, it seems an afterthought and is fairly poor. It's best to turn off the arcade mode once you've played it once, just to see what it's like.

The game is especially hard to play as NATO - you inevitably find yourself forced to attack enemy units with nuclear weapons, with the risk of the Warsaw Pact responding with a massive retaliation.

The computer plays a good game, despite being only a 48K Spectrum, and it's a tribute to the developers that they made the AI convincing with such limited resources. There are a few shortcomings, though - the Warsaw Pact side all too often, towards the end of the war when they are winning by a country mile, launches an all out nuclear strike, which means they get destroyed too by your reflex system. The computer also seems to also be a bit eager to use weapons of mass destruction when there's no real need for it to do so. In my opinion, the authors should have ditched the "arcade" mini-game altogether, and used those resources to make a more complex AI.

Released just a few years before the Cold War came to an end this game had an interesting scenario; a war in Europe between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. It's initially a conventional conflict, although things can rapidly escalate into nuclear Armageddon.

Like many other PSS wargames of the time, there's an arcade sub-game which you will almost certainly just play the once to see how bad it is before disabling it entirely.

Personally, I'd have preferred the space to have been devoted to a multi-screen map, but I'd guess it was just a reality of the day that pure strategy games generally didn't sell.

It's an OK game, passable for its time, but has neither the beautiful simplicity of the likes of Chaos or Viking Raiders or the complexity and historical accuracy of Arnhem or Desert Rats.

This is an unique study about a confrontation in Central Europe between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Key to the victory is West Germany - within a month, NATO must defend it while the Pact must occupy it. Therefore your strategy will vary according to which side you decide to command. The Pact also has access to some specialized units and has overall more forces at its disposal, but individually weaker than their NATO counterparts.

You also can choose from three different levels of complexity, which determine whether you can employ certain tactics as well as the use of chemical and nuclear weapons. In fact you should try to win the game without resorting to the use of weapons of mass destruction, because you could trigger a response that could potentially lead to a global nuclear war - a scenario where everybody loses.

Theatre Europe is played in turns, and each turn is split in four phases. It's possible to decide the outcome of battles by means of an arcade sub-game, but it's much more satisfactory to turn it off since it feels quite unrelated to the general pace of the game.

In the end, Theatre Europe is a complex strategy game which manages to convey a believable impression of realism with a relatively simple and player-friendly gameplay. The fact that you can also play against a human opponent enhances its longevity.