by Andrew Vawter - February 6, 2006

Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath is an alternate history game. In this case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 a U2 was shot down over flying Cuban airspace and this escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Now there are four sides: USSR, Anglo-American Alliance (US-UK), European Alliance (Germany and France), and lastly China.

Good Idea but Poor Execution

Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath has a grand total of four separate campaigns. In Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath the idea is to prepare for the oncoming nuclear winter that is a direct result of the use of wide-scale WMD use throughout the world. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath features both online and single player modes of play. The offline campaign plays quite a bit like Risk while the online play allows you to play skirmish maps. I should point out that multiplayer is LAN only and there appears to be no TCP/IP or any other form of play.

All of the campaigns play on a strategic map where you will order up new units, move tank battalions around, and deploy forces to defend your facilities. The strategic mode feels a lot like a game of Risk. Units are only able to move so only so far per turn with there speed being determined by the slowest moving unit in the group. Construction of units takes one turn per unit.

You will find most of the units in the game aren’t all that useful. Artillery units for example tend to have the same range as a tank. So you end up so close to your target that by the time they fire the enemy your attempting to engage has already closed and destroyed your artillery.

Dated

The graphics in Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath are good. Within the option menu you’ll find options such as a minimum frame rate, as well as options for resolutions up to 1600x1200. And you can change the speed at which the mouse moves across the screen (which is a bit low by default).

While the game itself has decent graphics, nothing in this game would have been all that impressive three years ago and now they tend to look just a bit dated. Most weapon effects look to be sprite based while tanks, explosions, and infantry seem to be a bit better off.

Just as Dated

While there are not too many sound options other then how loud the music or sound effects volume is, the sound in Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath never really sparkles and is just somewhat bland. Simply put you won’t be worrying about the sound while you are cursing your units inability to shoot a tank that single handedly takes out 40 of your infantry.

Just Plain Boring

Unfortunately, at the end of the day Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath is just really not very fun. Quite often your units just wind up being shot apart by entrenched enemy forces. You will usually end up losing four times as many forces as your opponent and your units will refuse to fire on an enemy target because the unit you are trying to use cannot penetrate the armor of the opposing unit. What is worse is that the enemy AI never makes a mistake and will always pick off the most dangerous target.

It actually gets worse though, sometimes when you’ve failed a mission and reload your previous save you’ll retry the mission and fail again. Thus you are left to assume you can’t win because you didn’t bring enough forces with you. Yet this theory is disproved when you do the automate battle option and the AI pulls off a victory where they don’t even lose a single unit. Does this mean that you’re just a terrible player or perhaps you should of spent more time planning your actions? No, because the automate battle option appears to work by adding together your overall unit strength vs. the enemy’s unit strength and declaring the victor based on unit strength and your difficulty level you’ve selected. So then, if you set the game to easy and automate all the battles you will probably never lose.

Nothing Noteable Here

The complete lack of any internet-based multiplayer really hurts this game. There is almost no chance you will ever find someone who has purchased this game and who is also on your LAN at the same time. Worse yet is the fact that the single player skirmish maps all face the same problem of the AI being in a far better position then the player will ever be.

It’s Not "Awful" but its "Okay" in a Genre Full of "Greats"

I really did not like this game. I found it to be a mesh of decent and just plain bad. The real time mode might have been acceptable if they had fine tuned the AI a little more and made it so whenever an enemy unit is hitting a friendly unit the location of the enemy unit was revealed so you could order your friendly units to attack. Personally, I don’t see anyone actually wanting to buy this game when there are far better games available.