I was very curious about Perdition's Gate for 2 reasons. One: because it was one of the few retail expansions for Doom 2, and 2: it was worked on by Mackey McCandlish. McCandlish is a level designer who many know as a Doom and Quake mapper, but I know as one of the lead level designers on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, one of my favorite FPSs of all time.

Judging from his work here, however, I'm afraid he's a much better CoD mapper than Doom mapper, IMO. I assume this was a rushed project, considering how around the half way point, the maps started getting short. Real short. Like, map 24 only had 20(!) monsters in it. They weren't even Arch Viles or Cyberdemons. Just mostly imps and shotgunners. I normally don't complain about short maps. If anything, a lot of PWADs kind of annoy me with how overly ambitious and long they are. Some short but sweet maps aren't a bad thing. But these are just nothing burgers. Many of these maps can be beaten in under a minute! Some of the maps in the last 3rd consist of only a single room! It's just plain boring.

It's clear to me PD was rushed as they probably wanted to get this on store shelves ASAP. The problem is that rushed wads like this are rarely worth playing. There are polished WADs that have been worked on for over a decade now that you can get for free!

The sad truth is, there's really no reason to hunt down Perdition's Gate (it's not on the ID Archive, assuming for legal reasons) outside of historical purposes, or morbid curiosity.

Unity of Command 2 is an excellent wargame for many reasons, but one very important one is this: it understands how wars are actually fought.

In most mainstream movies, books and even video games like FPSs, war is usually won by beating the big bad, blowing up their doomsday weapon, saving the love interest, etc. Reinforcements come right when they're needed, its all very cinematic and mindless spectacle, which is fine! It's entertainment, not educational media, but franchises about war, from Star Wars to modern-day Call of Duty, portray war in a very simplistic and cinematic way which is kinda antithetic to how wars are actually fought.

The awkwardly titled "Unity of Command 2" knows how wars are fought, and it's more about cold hard logistics than anything else. The beans and bullets. Your soldiers aren't going to be much good in a fight if they're starving, out of ammo for their guns or out of fuel for their tanks. Without supplies, units quickly become useless in combat. Thus UoC2 plays out more like a puzzle game (albeit one with multiple right answers which stops it from being a "true" puzzle game), specifically, a puzzle of logistics. The game is all about maintaining a massive web of divisions, supply hubs, and front lines. How can you move one army to take this enemy city, while maintaining your current supply line? What if an enemy unit pushes the front line to where it cuts off the supply line to your unit that was leading the charge? How can you cut off the enemy supply lines, rendering them helpless, or better yet, encircle and destroy them completely? Every situation has hundreds of different answers that can save or doom a battle. It's delightfully brain teasing that few games truly are.

Another refreshing thing about UoC2 is how historically accurate it is. Every campaign (save for alt history scenarios. More on those in a sec) is based on the real campaigns fought in WW2. The town names, the divisions involved, you can feel the dev's passion for history woven throughout the whole game. That's not to say the devs aren't willing to play with history a bit. One of the game's coolest features is the ability to change history and unlock alternative history scenarios. If you managed to take Rome in the battle of Monte Cassino, for example, you can make the Allies rush through North Italy to the Ardennes instead, thus starting the Allied invasion of Europe before D-Day! These alt history battles are always optional, but being rewarded with cool bonus "what if?" missions really add to the game's charm and replayability.

Unity Of Command 2 is a lovely introduction to the war game genre and a must-play for any strategy game fan or WW2 history buff.