As World War II draws to a close, Germany’s situation is deteriorating rapidly. The development of the ultimate weapons, which are being created in a covert subterranean bunker, is the only chance left for the conflict’s final days to turn around the unfavourable position. You are responsible for completing this assignment, thus you must have the patience and managerial abilities necessary. If you succeed, you’ll get promoted, but if not…
Even when viewing the game, a lot of people will be reminded of Fallout Shelter. A cross-section of the base, a display of the rooms, and the fundamental construction system are all used by Wunderwaffe in a view that is similar to this one.
It was already there in the current iteration of Xcom before that. But because Gameparic’s creators departed from the Fallout concept and guiding ideas, the experience is significantly altered. Therefore, drawing too many comparisons would be inappropriate and would lead you to see this game incorrectly. What can one anticipate from Wunderwaffe then? It is primarily a management game with an emphasis on raw material extraction and production, which results in scientific advancement and unique super projects at the end of it. You must establish and grow a base where the economy and production chains function precisely if you want to accomplish them.
You have an accessible entrance to the subterranean at the beginning, where supply transit arrives at regular intervals. However, you can’t entirely rely on it, so you must establish a self-sufficient foundation that can meet all of your immediate needs. Right away, you are under time pressure. The amount of days you have to construct a special weapon is limited (at the moment depending on the difficulty setting). Everything is lost and the war is lost if you don’t arrive by then. After constructing the command centre, from which you manage the supply of weaponry and raw resources to the eastern, northwestern, and southwestern fronts, this limit may be slightly increased.
The empire will hold out longer and you will gain an extra day if you send enough cement, rifles, machine guns, and modern war vehicles to the front lines.
The water pump and the power plant, which provide you with energy and water respectively, are located in the first underground rooms after the order. You have some basic resources, but you need more, so you look for supplies of coal, stone, and different metals underground and construct mines there.
Corridors are required to connect everything, and elevators allow access to deeper levels. The key room is a research facility with a technological tree that is fairly bushy and leads to a collection of unique weapons that are based on actual Nazi technology, albeit not all of them were successful or finished. You’re correct that in order to successfully accomplish your superweapons-related endeavours, you essentially need to investigate every upgrade from the three stages of development.
Specific items and raw materials are needed for each technology. However, it can also be cement, energy, sheet metal, uranium, and other substances. It is frequently gold and scientific information. You must first mine, process, and construct several of them. The addition of new rooms and plans enables you to create advanced materials and goods. You will find recipes for crushed stone, cement, and prefabricated walls, for instance, in the cement plant. You can make pistols, rifles, and other weapons and ammo from an expanding number of thoroughly researched manuals and the like using the weapons production line.
You control the individual production processes individually and can set the desired operation, and the number of batches, or choose automatic – infinity, where production will be permanent as long as there is something to produce. You just have to be careful that you don’t waste all the raw materials that might be missing elsewhere. There are many specific rooms and processes in the game, and they can also be improved, and we can be a little angry with the authors that they cannot be coordinated in one place, on one table. Instead, you have to click on individual rooms to open their menu. These areas are not even visibly marked at a normal glance, so in the advanced stage of the base it is quite confusing and you have a hard time finding your way around.
Mines and production lines require people, which you acquire by building staff quarters and then manually assigning them where you see fit. Provisions are also related to this, for which there is also a production room, but it is strange that it is made of gold and the creators did not come up with something more adequate – for example, the processing of some plants or animals, even if they are bred underground. Um, how about rat burgers? There are a few similar controversial and difficult-to-understand things in the game, but, fortunately, most of the processes have a logical structure and form.
Your management and construction efforts are constantly interrupted by alarms. Although you will not be ambushed by an enemy army, there is a threat of sabotage. Therefore, after the warning notification, you need to identify the threatened room according to the signal intensity and the flashing red light, and then just use the icon to neutralize the threat. If you don’t manage to do it in time, you will lose the mine, power plant or other premises, which can disrupt your production processes, and in addition, additional raw materials must be invested in the reconstruction.
The appearance of the game is not very attractive at first glance, Fallout Shelter managed to make the underground more colourful and visually appealing. Opposite the Wunderwaffe, it has dark spaces, which is in line with their location, but they don’t make a big impression. However, when you zoom in on the individual rooms and even on the full screen, it looks pretty good there and you can see solid details and people. The tables with the production processes and operations are austere and could show more descriptions of what is happening there and zoom in on the basic functions. There is no comprehensive tutorial in the game, only occasional advice. Experienced players can manage and intuitively know what to do, but if you don’t often encounter management games, you may have trouble getting into it.
It would also require a better overall overview of rooms, production, workers, raw materials and products. At the top of the screen, there is only selected data, and if you want to know how much you have of each item, you have to click on stocks. The sounds in the game are very modest, although some have been added after the latest patch, at least solid music tries to cover it. You get used to the controls quite quickly, but when you move the cursor to see areas outside the main screen, sometimes the view gets stuck and the control does not respond. Fortunately, when you use the mouse to move instead of the keys (or vice versa), it moves again.
The journey to the final will take you several hours, but it doesn’t have to succeed. It also depends on your skill and how quickly you learn the principles of the game. It might end up being a fiasco on the first try because you’re learning on the fly and the time limit will run out before you get far enough. By the second game, you will already know what and how, and it will go more smoothly. There is also an option to pause the game, it’s a shame you can’t use it to plan activities, but speeding up will help you if you’re waiting for production to finish or some raw materials to be dug up and you don’t have anything to do in the meantime.
A big help for Project Wunderwaffe is the 1.1 update that saves it from being damned. However, it’s a shame that it didn’t come sooner because many already resented the game because of the practically impossible limit, bad balancing and bugs. Not that the authors have already removed all the shortcomings, but certainly at least the fundamental ones. The most important thing is that you already have a choice of three difficulties. The hardest keeps the 45-day restriction, but the medium gives you 80 days and the light up to 120. This already plays much better, although with more benevolence you get fewer points in the final score. This may interest you if you want to enter the world rankings. Project Wunderwaffe didn’t get off to a good start, and when the developers messed up the premiere, a key patch with fixes and difficulty selection was supposed to be available immediately after release. In its current state, the game is already in much better shape and is not sunk by extreme difficulty or fundamental flaws, although there is still much to fine-tune. But the topic is very interesting and being a designer of secret Nazi weapons is an attractive challenge. However, keep in mind that the game is primarily about creating production chains and rooms, where precise management and economics are important.
