A turn-based strategy that makes the Second American Civil War semi-fun again

The last game developed by PopTop Software, before the game studio was merged with Firaxis, best known for their work on Railroad Tycoon and Tropico series, and published by Take-Two Interactive, which these days goes by the moniker of 2K, Shattered Union was not exactly a swan song a respected developer would wish for.

The backstory of Shattered Union must have been envisioned by partially clairvoyant people who were channeling some of real-life American and European history from 2016-2025. In 2008, Donald Tr…whoops, I mean David Jefferson Adams, became the US President after a disputed election while losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College, only to be placed in power by his party loyalists in Congress. He immediately enacts a domestic policy of incompetent, divisive lawlessness that triggers a rise in civil unrest and domestic terrorism, crowned by a declaration of martial law. After four years of Making America Horrible Again, his puppets in the Supreme Court hand him a second term, which ends in a low-yield nuclear blast during his inauguration ball, wiping out The Bestest Administration Ever from the face of the Earth, along with most of the US capitol city.

Faced with the fact that most of the federal government can now fit in an ashtray with no line of succession, the rest of the country does the most logical thing you would do in such a situation and splinters into six factions that immediately go at each other’s throats. The European Union sends an expeditionary peacekeeping force to the Eastern Coast, and after you play a few turns in-game, the Russian Federation seizes Alaska, claiming it was theirs all along.

The playable factions are:

• California Commonwealth
• Pacifica
• The Republic of Texas
• Great Plains Federation
• The Confederacy
• New England Alliance
• The European Union
• Russian Federation (multiplayer only)

Gameplay during the US map screen comes down to buying and repairing your units. Each territory on the map generates a certain amount of money each turn, a gives passive bonuses to your units, such as lower overall cost, higher attack and defense stats, and fuel capacity.

You can only attack adjacent territories. Once you choose your next objective, you can select which units you will commit to fight and which will be left in reserve. After the tactical battle is over, the rest of the factions will take their turn and might attack one of your possessions. Only the units you didn’t use during your attack phase will be available for defense. Then again, you can just concede a territory, which might happen automatically if you sent in all of your armada into attack and have no reserves.

The battle phase opens up by committing unspeakable crimes against your eyes. It took me a few seconds to distinguish actual units from the battlefield after the initial shock of how bad the graphics looked, even by the standards of 2005. Pro-tip: never let the AI automatically deploy your units; it does it in the stupidest fashion possible, and it always ends up in a disaster.

Battles on the hex-grid are where this game actually does most things right. There are no useless classes of units. Infantry can be used as cheap door-stop cannon fodder in defense roles. During the opponent’s turn, anti-aircraft vehicles automatically engage enemy aircraft that get within their protection radius. Light and medium tanks are a great investment since they are basically expendable, really fast, big guns on wheels with paper armor. While all unit designs are based on actual military hardware that exists in the Northern hemisphere, heavy tanks of all factions look and act like their sci-fi counterparts from the Command & Conquer series – they soak up heavy damage, and ruin the enemy’s day when they fire back. Helicopters are worth every penny if used to pop up behind their troops, hit the enemy, and then retreat beyond the opponent’s AA range. Similar to AA, jet fighters are used to patrol a defense radius, and bombers are deadly if they don’t run into the enemy’s air defenses. With the exception of one-time-use units that you can buy before the battle, every unit class has a purpose. Partisan units represented by Mad Max armed civilian vehicles are randomly generated in most battles. Yes, the Texans are sporting weaponized pick-up trucks.

Things get wonky when you realize that this game has no concept of Zones of Control. What that means is that every enemy unit can slip past your own, if there is a free hex, and get behind your front lines to devastate the extremely expensive and extremely vulnerable artillery, SAMs, and choppers. This is just against any sort of either real-life or strategy gaming logic, and kills a lot of fun when you realize that you can’t protect your fragile and valuable support units behind frontline troops.

The other annoying gamey feature is that many unit types have Air Attack capability. This leads to weird situations where helicopters and arty engage patrolling fighter jets. No, just no.

Sidebar offers power-up options that keep expanding as the game progresses, ranging from nano-magic instant healing to cybernetic infantry. Power-ups are not completely useless, and they are based on your political rating, which is determined by how many civilian buildings you destroy during the game. While combat in urban areas is mostly unavoidable, since most victory hexes the player needs to occupy are there, I was unable to get any sort of “evil” political standing.

Russian involvement in the conflict is represented by air drops of power-ups and additional recon units at the start of each tactical turn. One of your units needs to pick it up by going to the hex where the airdrop lands. Russian gifts are pretty much useless, but beggars can’t be choosers.

In tactical battles, the best course of action seems to be to immediately finish off damaged enemy units, because units deal the same amount of attack damage regardless of how much HP they have. An M1 Abrams with 1 life point can wreak havoc if you let it live to fight another turn.

Enemy AI is fairly competent in tactical battles. Not so much on the strategic map. And no, there aren’t any diplomatic or espionage options available, which is kind of a wasted potential, considering the fact that most people involved don’t exactly have a language and cultural schism between them.

Don’t treat your units like the Russian High Command does in real life, because they accumulate experience, carry over through the campaign, and you will always be on a tight budget.

The somber, militaristic soundtrack is surprisingly decent.

Once you complete your objective of restoring the United States of ‘Murica by killing many ‘Muricans, the Russian revanchist, mafia-boss military dictator is revealed to be behind the Washington nuclear blast that threw the USA into chaos. So it’s time for the big showdown, and your entire armed forces attack Alaska. PopTop Software seemed to be perfectly aware of actual Russian military capabilities back in 2005 because, just like in the Ukraine war of our timeline, Russian forces turn out to be a combined arms circus and will fold like a cheap suit. Worst last boss fight ever. I can’t help but notice that a real-life Russian ruling clique invested in corrupt Western politicians, troll farms, and empty threats of energy and nuclear blackmail, while a Russian general from a game invested in a tiny, cheap nuke. How’s that for a return on investment?

You’ll need dgVoodoo2 to run this game on Windows 10 and a Blurry Texture Fix for Railroad Tycoon 3 placed in the game’s root folder.

The verdict:

Good for two boring afternoons when you have nothing else to play and you just loved the TV series Jericho. If you’re into what-if retro strategies with modern military equipment, you can do better with Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath and its expansion, Cuban Missile Crisis: Ice Crusade.