As someone who enjoys anything WWII and loves strategy games, I’m a bit ashamed to say I’ve never played a Sudden Strike game. Part of that is because until Sudden Strike 4 the series was never on console but even that slipped off my radar at the time. Thankfully Sudden Strike 5 has been on my radar since its announcement, and if this hands off preview is anything to go by, it should be on your radar as well.

The preview showcased the level Vitebsk, a real setting from WWII in which the Soviets pushed the Germans out of the Belarus city. Before you start the level, in the pre-battle screen you can select your commander and spend Doctrine points to select what skills you will go into battle with.

These skills range from better infantry units to better health and healing. It’s a great introduction to each level to help you figure out what you are going to want to do in battle. It seems like the more you progress into the game the more Doctrine points you will earn and help you select better skills.

With your choices made you start the level with a large army with a mix of tanks, infantry and an armored train. The armored train was the star of the level, capable of taking out almost anything in it’s path while helping move the infantry across the map with ease.

Vitebsk, like all the maps in Sudden Strike 5, is very open and feels like a sandbox. You will have multiple main objectives and how you go about them is completely up to you, though there are some advantages of doing them in a certain order.

In Vitebsk the mission was pretty straightforward. Capture some checkpoints and take back the town from the Germans. In some of the checkpoints you will find Officer tents. If you capture the officer tent you will learn valuable intel about secondary objectives and important enemy locations. It might reveal the location of an enemy artillery unit or an airfield.

These specific checkpoints and high value areas are likely where you want to focus your efforts first. Capturing an airfield will help you be able to launch your own air support while also taking away the enemies. In Vitebsk there were actually 2 airfields so leaving the second one meant you still had to deal with enemy air support, but you can of course capture both and have air superiority.

The other important objectives to focus on are the military checkpoints. Unlike previous Sudden Strike games, Sudden Strike 5 allows you to bring in additional troops, but only from these checkpoints. Calling in more units or using the different supports you have available will cost you prestige which you earn while in mission. This adds yet another element to the strategy. Do you build a stronger army with more troops and tanks, or save your prestige to call in support?

There’s also the important Supply Depots. Your tanks and vehicles need fuel to run, without a supply depot your vehicles will be left stranded in the battlefield and leave you at a severe disadvantage.

The armored train is also a very important piece to the strategic puzzle that has me quite excited. Being a train it can only help you where tracks are. So do you follow the tracks with your army to keep the train in play at the expense of a more direct route? Or do you abandon the train and just run right in.

Reactive Enemies

One of the more intriguing features of Sudden Strike 5 is how the AI will react to your tactical decisions. In previous Sudden Strike games things were a bit more scripted. You would reach an area in the map and enemies would attack based on you hitting that particular spot.

With Sudden Strike 5, the AI will make tactical decisions of its own. If you attack the airfield, the enemy will launch a counter attack as the airfield is such an important piece of land. Attack the airfield and a military checkpoint at the same time, and well the AI will make a decision of which to focus on. Sometimes they might send smaller units to both, but other times they may just sacrifice one for the other and launch an all out counter assault to save the other.

Because of this you will have to keep troops in certain areas or risk losing your advantage. Many military strategy games are simply “go here, clear this and move on” with no fear of moving on. With Sudden Strike 5 if you don’t leave some units at your newly captured airfield it is likely the enemy will take it back.

This alone adds a very interesting dynamic to your strategy. Having no idea how big of a force the enemy might send your way leaves you with interesting decisions. How much of your army do you leave behind to defend? Leave too many and your advancing force is weakened. Leave too few and you will get overrun. I’m quite excited to see more of how that will work.

That said there are still some scripted moments in Sudden Strike 5 when they make sense. In Vitebsk the main objective was to capture and hold the town. So once you do capture it there is an instant reaction from the enemy to try to take the town back which is natural.

Campaign Details

Overall, Sudden Strike 5 is set to feature a healthy campaign. There will be 3 separate campaigns with a total of 25 missions. Those missions vary in size with some being able to be completed in a half hour or less and others taking over an hour. This of course all depends on your playstyle, difficulty settings and general skill in a strategy game, but Kite Games says it should be a 20-30 hour campaign for most.

Each mission is also historically accurate with caveats. The locales of the missions and some of the details are very much historically accurate. However in order to make the game more enjoyable they took some liberty with how things happened. For example in one of the missions the real battle took place during an intense snowstorm. Because of this, air support was unavailable. However in Sudden Strike 5 they still allow the air support.

Whether you think that is good or you want real authenticity is up to you, but at the end of the day Kite decided to do what they thought best for the player.

Also because of the sandbox style of each mission, some maps are up to 4 times bigger than anything seen in Sudden Strike 4. We will have to see how that plays out as bigger maps don’t always mean better depending on how densely populated they are with enemies and things to do. In Vitebsk at the very least it seemed like it was balanced quite nicely, so hopefully that is true in all the missions.

The Return of WWII Strategy Games

Overall, this preview made me more excited for Sudden Strike 5. WWII strategy games are few and far between these days, especially on console, and its about time we got a new one to sink our teeth into. While it may not have the flare of a AAA game (Kite Games has 25 employees) it has managed to create a solid strategy game that makes strategy fun.

Sudden Strike 5 will release in 2026 for PC, Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5.