I'm a long time fan of different kinds of strategy games and also the Hearts of Iron series. And HoI 3 is no exception. Though the launch was somewhat messed up because of bugs that made the game very slow in later years in the game, the latest patch have fixed the problems nicely. So I bought the game after 1.3 was released and I give it 5/5 stars. To shortly compare HoI 3 to HoI 2, the game mechanics have been completely revised: battles are more realistic in land, air and sea, diplomacy isn't tied so much to history as before, technology is more expandable, politics as more diversity. All in all it's more and better than previous parts in the series.

A great addition to the HOI series. Although the basic unpatched version has many flaws including an almost unbearably slow speed, one can rely on Paradox to come out with patches that will make this a great game. Also, they have made the game very easy to mod so if something about it doesn't float your boat, then fix it. Some of the best features in my opinion are the HQ system, the Brigades, and the huge increase in the number of provinces. Also, the laws instead of sliders is a huge plus as is the new technology interface.----All in all a great game with huge potential that unfortunately had quite a few issues at release. Get it. You won't be dissapointed in the long run.

Bought this game as am a great fan of the HOI serioes. Was initially dissapointed, not with the game, but with the performance particularly in multi player. A new graphics card (1G memory but my main machine is 512 mg that runs as well as the 1G) and patch 1.2 later this game performs brilliantly in multi player, the out of sync has gone and both single and multi play perform at a more than acceptable level. Game play itself is good with far more options for 'alternative' history than in previous HOI versions, particularly if playing the 1936 scenario. The open structure of historical content allows for a much wider strategy choice whilst still allowing players to follow an historical path if they so wish. Support from Paradox is superb, as it always has been in my experience, and for lovers of strategy games HOI3 is a must play.

Hello fellow players, i am playing with the 1.2 patch and until now i have had no show-stoppers. On my hardware (dualcore 3ghz with 3,5 gig ram under xp), the game is well playable, although i would have liked a little bit of more sophisticated software engineering. I think its hilarious to write single-threaded software in 2009. I am giving it 3 stars.

I've held off reviewing this game for some of the patches to come out. While this game is the next in line of a great series, it currently suffers in playability. However, once things are fully patched this game seems like it will play great. It holds true to the series while still trying new things. Research is overhauled, and army hierarchy is an interesting feature once you work it all out. If you like paradox style games you'll no doubt like HoI3, but give it another patch or two.

The definitive World War II grand strategy game! Do you imagine combining a deep tactical approach, more dinamic than HoI2, with a real challenge in logistics and supplies... and the strategical questions, including politics, intelligente and spionage issues? That is HoI3! The game is sensible for your decisions: running a-historical provides a-historical outcomes, so don't expect an automatic hardcoded declaration of war. It could come in advance if your strategy is too aggressive (and you don't hesitate in playing some diplomatic roles). And you will have to play hard in intelligence and diplomatics to win allies in your faction. Huge itself, the only "but" for the game is a few things not running properly (countries' technologies in advanced scenarios, some questiones with AI...) but Paradox's patches policy is well known for its quickness (and eficacy). Imprescindible for strategy lovers.

The game is complex, requiring that you read the manual several times to make sure to get the most out of the game. Thankfully, you can give many of your tasks to the AI which will do them well enough. It is a massive game in scope that thus needs time to bug fix and improve the AI and game logic. That is normal for any game now a days. All in all, if you like alternate history and grand strategy get this game. Remember, the learning curve is steep but worth the time.

Im a big fan of PI´s games and have almost every one of them that they are behind so this is no exception. The system is more open in this if we compare it to HoI2. Countries enters alliances almost random but you can effect it by using diplomacy and intellligence (spies). You dont make decisions like in Hoi2 regarding the history. HoI3 is a far more open game which i like alot more. YOU can decide what happens in history. The theatre system is brilliant and so is the HQ´s, that means you can let the AI take care of fighting for you or you can do it by yourself. Just make sure to tell ur highest HQ´s to tell where to go and attack, defend, prepare och blitz ur enemy and they will take into account what units they will need to complete this task effectively. One warning tough, the game is early in release and there are some bugs and stuff but i know Paradox and i know they will over come this and then this game will be the greatest, heaviest, hardcore strategy game out there. So to sum up, if you can live with some faults BUY it, or wait one two months.

Pros: Deep, Interesting, and some nice compromises between HOI1 and HOI2. Technology is significantly more interesting than in HOI2, and the interfaces for the various Diplomacy, Politics, etc., are much friendlier and allow you to offload those duties to an AI. Cons: Very hard to see what province you have selected on the map (well, basically my eyes can't tell). You can't really tell what you're building on the strategic map anymore either. You can't cancel a build order for provinces (once you add more industry, e.g., you cannot undo that, or ask it to not actually build that building). Its very hard to manage your tech-queues. You cannot, for example, click on a tech in a queue and have any clue from that where in the 8-page list of techs that particular one came from. All you can do is cancel it or prioritize it. You can't tell either what its "learn date" is, since it doesn't tell you and it doesn't jump to that tech's location in the master tech list. Game balance still seems really off to me. If I play the '36 scenario as Germany, even on easy I am wick low on oil by '39 (by low I mean totally bankrupt), and I am sadly far behind in technologies compared to historical dates. My troops are better than most of those around me, but they fall far short of having what Germany had at that time (I can easily have 60 techs queued up to use the 15 actual slots available at a time - there's just no way to get as many as they actually did in fact from within the game). The strategic map not only fails to show you which province you've selected, but often fails to update the labels of the provinces, so you cannot tell even by manually finding the province listed on the map. And in political map mode, whereas in hoi1&2 you could see clear blocks of colors to tell what you owned, what your allies owned, etc., now you get subtle variations on the same few colors making it very hard to tell what provinces are currently held by what nation. These really are fairly minor. But one would expect a 3rd edition of a franchise to actually have that kinks pretty well worked out. Not so. Sadly, not so.

I waited almost for two month to try and play HOI 3 and was the first to buy the game and dowload the digital version of it, much to my surprise I didnt like the game new map and map colour!! The game is boring to play, I uninstaled it and went back playing the previous HOI 2 doomsday. My rating to it is 3

What is best about this Third installment is that it feels like a new game, but also has a HOI2 feel. Tech teams are gone, and have been replaced with more of a component practical type research. The intelligence system has also been completely overhauled. If you are a HOI fan this is a definite must by, and if you are not and enjoy grand strategy where you can re-write history then don't miss this one.

This game is really awesome. It's a huge step forward compared to HOI2: new diplomacy options, a whole new technology system, streamlined intelligence, new HQ system... This comes with a price though - the new features have to be balanced very carefully. The game also runs very slow. If these things get fixed i'd give it 5 stars - until then it's 4 stars but still I recommend buying it.

It is really amazing strategy game and demands time and patient. I strongly recommend it as its full of fun and thinking tooo. It has too many applications more then the previouse versions. You can also choose any nation you want and promote any general you want and control politics and economy every single bit of the country.

If you like strategie, buy it! If you like micromanagement, buy it. The Game has some perfomance issues, the fastest Game speed is approximately normal Gamespeed in HoI2. There are some bugs that kill the Gamebalance and the oppurtunity to play historical at this moment, but knowing Paradox and Mods... it will be more playable after some patches. As always you can choose almost every country in the world with the hope to conquer the whole world. I prefer conquer China with tibet :)! Newbies will have problems in the beginning but also great help of the AI, so they just can lean back and watch the AI conquering the world. Pros have got more possibilities to eeffect the Game with intel or Diplomacy. I couldnt wait, so i bought it the first day... maybe i am sorry now, because some bugs and the speed problems, but knowing paradox and mods(although some things cant be modded) i believe this can be one of the greatest strategie games ever been made. Buy it if you dont bought it yet... Pls. excuse my bad english

"some performance issues..." Seriously I have a Quad core with stacks of RAM and a top of the line vid card and this runs like a dog as soon as you're 10 mins in. Even scrolling around the map becomes a pain in the arse. HOI2 was a great game and this is too probably, but theres too many new and exciting things to hate: - The change from picture troop icons to square NATO style icons that mean nothing to those who aren't uber geek war gamers. - Realism gone too far, just too many territories. I really just don't think New Zealand needs to be 18.... - Neutrality and other settings making it actually almost impossible to declare war on someone without spending years of gametime preparing with spies... ugh... - They've also made unit control mental by adding a convoluted HQ command structure which makes it a nightmare to organise large numbers of units. So yes, after patch 1, 2 and 3 maybe it'll be good. Currently it's painful.

As it stands (day one of release) HOI3 is a fantasy role playing game that bears little or no resemblance to reality ... and certainly doesn't more than vaguely resemble WW2. The game speed is (currently) glacially slow on most standard systems, taking an average of 4 minutes or so per month at full speed, longer for many, there is no way of zooming in or out unless you have a scroll wheel mouse, and there is a bug in the latest patch (which is the version you get through GG!) that makes the game unplayable because it multiplies the amount of Consumer Goods that are needed by military units up to sixteen times normal ... so if you want to go to war you'll find that you can't supply units that, historically, you could have. Even the broken alliance rules of HOI 1/2 don't seem to exist in HOI3 and it is impossible to play a game which even vaguely resembles reality (assuming that, as the advertising claims, it is a WW2 game rather than a fantasy game on a map resembling earth in 1936-48 ... I bought it being fooled into thinking it was actually a WW2 game). Paradox will, eventually, over the next year or so, fix some of these problems ... slowly ... and I'd really recommend that anyone contemplating buying it wait a year before doing so ... unless they want something that resembles WW2 ... in which case they're probably not ever going to get it in this release. Maybe in HOI4 ... or HOI5 ... or ...

Ok so after a few games, I must say I am impressed. The HQ system is awesome. I'm not much the kind of guy who like to give order to every single 200 divisions when I play, so now with the HQ AI you can give orders to HQs and objectives and they will execute your orders as best as they can. They will even use the aircraft and bomber for you. Since that was one of the things that was stopping me to enjoy HoI2 I am very pleased by that system, but still for those who like to give orders to single division you still can. Another place where Paradox as greatly improve the game is in the Inteligence section (think spies) it is now much more easy to use and much more intuitive. The leadership system is a good one too since it is like dispersing competent men to either research,diplomacy,inteligence or leadership (generals). All in all everything is more complex but much more easy to understand, so even though you're not an expert of the serie (like me) you can still understand and enjoy the game. At the current state of the game (version 1.1) there are still many bugs and map errors but never the less I recommend the game if you're interested in WW2 and because Paradox as an history of perfecting their game through patches so the minor problems should be away in some months. For myself I'm going back to the game, enjoy!

Hearts of Iron III is a huge step forward for an already excellent game. Besides all the cited improvements (see above), notable is the huge (HUGE) improvement to the UI and general user-friendlieness. In fact, if you turn on all the AIs that you can optionally have running various parts of your country, the game is so friendly that you almost literally don't have to play at all! But essentially, all the changes are simple improvements; the core game still stands and everything we loved is still there. The only, minor, things I could criticise is the very very brief tutorial, which seems to assume you know what you are doing, and the lack of a mouse-centered zoom (I told you it was minor...). so, if you liked HoI 1-2, you will certainly love this.

It's finally here :) I did like Hearts of Iron very much, but the third installment blows me away. Not that I am already deep into the game, that takes a while. But from what I have seen, the interface ist crisp and clean, thoughtfully designed and just stylish - and it finally runs on modern resolutions (though I wished the textures of the icons would scale better to the current zoom levels). There are dozens of new possibilities which I still have to explore :) This is the rare kind of game that will stay installed for many years to come!

First of all don't expect something similar to Hearts of Iron 2 you'll be most likely a bit disappointed then, however once you find your way into the system behind Hearts of Iron 3 it just gets better and better. The main fault at the moment is a few bugs and performance issues but you can expect Paradox to fix them and if that still isn't enough the mod community will surely bring something nice out. For new players to this genre of games I'd really suggest trying the demo and maybe a few older Paradox titles to see what all the fuzz is about. Most certainly this is a niche game and it's not for everyone but for this niche it's the best out there.