Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront

It’s addictive as hell and incredibly replayable. There are a TON of campaign missions covering both Axis and Allied forces. I’ve sunk over 200 hours into the game, and have barely completed 1/3 of them while jumping between playing campaign, conquest, and mods from the workshop. Whilst the overall objectives remain the same when replaying a mission in campaign, the multitude of options given to you to complete them and how the AI reacts to your differing strategies offer more than enough variety to prevent getting stale. Conquest offers an even greater scale of variety that allows you to fine tune your fighting forces to your preferred doctrines in offensive and defensive based missions. Tripwire Studios has done an amazing job with the level of historic detail mixed perfectly variety of gameplay. Their care in supporting the game, and continuing to expand with new factions, units, and missions keep me excited for more. The modding community expands the replayability as well with a boatload of new gameplay mechanics, units, and missions that will keep even players with thousands of hours sunk into the game occupied. (I highly recommend the first person POV mod, it adds such a level of depth to the game) 10/10 would blitzkrieg again (and will)

I went from Men Of War games (incl MOW:AS2) to Men Of War 2 (not a bad game) to this one and this is the ultimate experience. First thing I noticed: good tutorial + tutorial movies! 9/10

I was skeptical at first. Turns out it's a great game. Very fun to spend time on, but the micromanaging can get tedious over time.

If you're a fan of real-time strategy games rooted in historical accuracy, I highly recommend this one. The battles are based on real events, and the depth of strategy is incredible. With over 200 hours played, I’m still learning new mechanics and refining my tactics—which speaks volumes about the game’s complexity and replayability. The community is one of the game’s strongest assets. Players are helpful, passionate, and always willing to share tips or discuss strategy. The multiplayer scene is both competitive and respectful, creating a great environment for improvement and fun. Huge credit also goes to the developers, who are active, transparent, and deeply invested in both the game and its players. Frequent updates and community-driven improvements show they truly care. It can be challenging at times, but that’s exactly what makes it so rewarding. Unlike many other RTS games, it pushes you to think, adapt, and grow—and that’s what makes it stand out.

lagfest, but way better than every other men of war franchise before. Recommend getting it on sale due to the price tag along with DLC.

This game is really really good. IDK how to explain it, but after being disappointed for the past 25 years, after being spoiled with Sudden Strike Forever, I never really found a WW2 RTS that could compare. Not even SS3, or SS4. Well this is the one. This is the sequel to Sudden Strike I've waited the past 25 years for.

A game full of depth and flexibility, one where simply throwing yourself toward the enemy is not a viable solution. From a top down RTS to Third- and First-Person views, the actions you issue to your troops, the choice of munition and defense you utilize, and your performance as a individual soldier/vehicle will greatly impact the outcome. CTA might present itself as a simple RTS with FPS gimmicks, but as you play you'll learn how well developed both are and how essential they are to your success. This game provides multiple venues to enjoy it from solo campaign, co-op campaign, local AI multiplayer, and online coop/ai/pvp that there is certainly something for all flavors of the genre. The ammo you use, the angle you are at, the cover you hide behind, the way you sneak....refueling, resupplying, relocating....Air, land, and sea....there are so many aspects to this game that make it fun, enjoyable, replayable, and at times challenging, calling upon patience and thought. A pseudo spiritual successor in some ways to a game I grew up on (combat missions) and a number of others than came after. This was just the modern variant I could have dreamed up.

The game can satisfy alot of your fixes. From tank game-play, to strategy, or to police the bodies and repair vehicles because you want to just goof off and waste time. I ain't gonna waste time and write a review for all the expansions, but I have enjoyed them. There are some frustrations in this game. The AI can be funny or irritating. I been jumping between different campaign stories, and I found them to be quite enjoyable. Others to be miserable, causing me to do something else in the game, or look up game-plays of these missions to understand what I should do. And that is the thing. Don't fret, this game is challenging, and I love that. It has me breaking old habits of mine from other RTS games, and develop new ones. One thing I love alot about this game, is both 1st person and 3rd person control. Sometimes your AI units are urrrrrrrr, and you have to be like that ME2 collector and "Assuming Direct Control". Its feels like a first person shooter pushing the PS1 to its limits, and I love the devs for this. Its brings me down memory lane when I go 1st person on some of my units with these graphics and the wonky yet simple control. I haven't touched co-op so I cannot tell you anything about that, other that it is there. Both campaign and it seems dynamic also has it, but I do not know how that works. Which brings me to the graphics. They ain't to fancy, they ain't cheap. Its just right. Some computers can go max, others may not. I love it, and its wildly attractive. The firefights are pretty wicked, but man when you ammo rack a tank, it feels like the devs hired Micheal Bay for that. Then the Dynamic campaign is quite the drug. You can play it short for a few missions, or long for about 30 or so. Or infinite, but I dunno how that will work. You get to choose how your army develops, resupply after each mission, and improve your reinforcements. The research tree is very extensive. Each turn you get , you have missions to choose one of. Low risk or high risk, as indicated by the stars. Then the enemy gets to counter attack, rinse and repeat until game is finished. You earn supply and research points each mission. The enemy is affected by the difficulty level you chose for it. So beware. Downsides of this game. The tutorial is basic as expected. It needs a layer of advanced tutorial. I had to learn a few things the hard way from some key bindings, to how to auto supply and auto medic. The AI can be frustrating, Its a double edged sword affecting both you and them. Mods disable achievements, so if you want some sort of cushion like infinite supply crate for the harder campaign missions. You pretty much S.O.L. Same with Sound mods, they disable achievements too. I will recommend this game. I have been ejoying it alot.

I've got like 1k hours in the total war games, mostly in wh3 and shogun2. I thought this game was gonna be clunky and bad. Similar to all the other inventory games like DayZ, and Arma, but I think its great. I also think that the cinematic opportunity is really nice. I don't play total war because of the challenge really, I mostly play on normal and just try to make epic tales of empires. This game has that same quality, but also an oh shoot, I desperately need to micro this real quick. idk, I've looked for a ww2 total war game and its this without the civ aspect to it. You can still pick all your units, developing them as they stay alive. I can say tho, I didn't love playing this game at first bc I felt like I was a hack if I couldn't do it with the fog of war on.... I'll just say it, I can't win without it haahaha. However, it opened up the game for me, and I'll tell you, just how there are levels to total war, there are levels to this shiznet

good game but after 20 hours of game play it started crashing cause my system couldn't handle it and since it took 20 hours cant refund it :(

If you’re looking for the ultimate WWII RTS experience, stop searching. This is the game to play right now—nothing else comes close.

No UI scaling after 4 years is crazy. Until thats fixed game can't be recommended.

just buy it if you are into singleplayer! this game is cheater infected not because the devs cant handle it but because they dont care. i reported them a workshop item that clearly is used to cheat. they can delete it but they dont want to because "many reasons we dont want to go through" the dev responding to me did even guess which mod i was referring to so they are very aware about this happening... singleplayer is decent but performance is pretty bad if many units are on the map. but doesnt have much content without DLCs.

cursor not locking to game window and moving to second monitor while playing

Sadly this is a buggy mess, between the awfull inventory and squad management, and the potato brain of your AI as well as the ennemy one, I can't have a mission going the way it was intented. Sometime your soldier have a gun and ammo, told to shoot at sight, but just stand there blankly starring at the incoming bullets. Sometimes your whole squad is loaded with shovels and mines, yet only one of them is going to do all the job. The game is great overall, but getting past the bug wall is really hard and tirring. No, I don't want to have to micro manage 50 soldiers while getting pounded by planes and tank, no I don't want to have to restart a mission because my medic died and now I can't revive anyone on the battlefield, no, I don't want to restart a mission because my anti tank gun burned all his ammo on infantry because you can't filter what target he will attack. Sorry, the game is good, but the QoL is awful.

Call to Arms – Gates of Hell: Ostfront isn’t your typical World War II strategy game—it’s a gritty, hardcore RTS that pulls you into the mud and blood of the Eastern Front with brutal authenticity and a steep learning curve that rewards patience and precision. Built on the Men of War engine, Gates of Hell combines large-scale strategic control with direct-unit management, giving you the ability to zoom out and command entire armies—or dive in and manually control a single soldier or tank. This hybrid approach is where the game shines, offering a dynamic battlefield experience few other titles can match. The attention to historical detail is impressive: from realistic armor penetration and ballistics to accurate uniforms and terrain, the game feels like it respects its source material without falling into cinematic clichés. Every skirmish feels earned, every loss stings, and victories are often narrow and hard-fought. The single-player campaigns are intense, focusing heavily on Soviet and German perspectives during the harshest years of WWII. Missions often feel more like tactical puzzles than traditional RTS fare, with limited resources forcing you to think creatively and use the terrain to your advantage. However, Gates of Hell is not without its rough edges. The interface can be clunky, especially for newcomers, and AI behavior (both enemy and allied) occasionally breaks immersion. It’s a demanding game that assumes its players are already familiar with the Men of War/Call to Arms formula. That said, for fans of tactical realism and historical warfare, Call to Arms – Gates of Hell: Ostfront delivers an uncompromising and deeply rewarding experience. It’s not trying to be cinematic—it’s trying to be authentic. And on that front, it absolutely succeeds. Rating: 8/10

UI is too small to read on 4K. None of the settings seem to have any effect. Unplayable.

Putting out another title while this game is literally unplayable on a dual monitor setup and the resolution constantly gets stuck on the monitors if you tab out. Friendly AI is useless enemy lays in an open field? tanks lose sight and let them crawl right up unless you manually tell them to shoot the ones laying down. going prone does not do this against enemy AI tanks though as they can auto target anything everywhere on the map. not worth more than $10 in current state and the content. Modders have added more content in a quarter of the time of the dev team that is far more detailed.

Literally unplayable. The furthest I got was the 1st cutscene of the 1st mission then it crashed. After that it kept crashing before even getting to the main menu, then after a couple more tries I managed to get to a mission loading screen but then it still crashed again. I had nothing running in the backround either. Unless youre spoiled or make enough money yourself to afford an expensive PC (2k+) you cant play this game. Real shame cause it looks cool, but clearly has dogshit optimization and cant run to save its life. I have an RTX 2060 and Ryzen 7 1700 and can run 90% of modern games just fine. This game is 3+ years old and still hasnt been made playable on PC's that dont run on nuclear power? Unexcusable, lazy, and terrible optimization.

I really don't understand why developers do not add in (or better yet just develop alongside for release) UI scaling. Impossible to read at 2160, and barely possible to read at 1440, so playing at 1080 it is. If anyone is a developer or has insight knowledge on why this is thing I'm genuinely curious.

Don't be mistaken, it's not a COH like. You only control one soldier/squad at a time, and there's TONS of micro managements to deal with. Not my type of RTS but I can't share a bad review because it legit seems like a great game. + 1 for that sandbox campaign system.

The Devs removed the direct control deactivation from the multiplayer options.

i wanna give this game a positive review, because there is so much that i love in this game, i just cant because i find my units braindead as hell, and will often just stare at the enemy while they are rolling a large gun towards them, for my units to just twiddle their thumbs, while being bombarded by the enemy. This is something that occurs each and every game i play, also the units pathfinding is really bad. if they just fix these things i would say its a perfect game.

When you play the game for the first time, you can't get used to it easily, but when you complete the training missions and after a few conquest attempts, you can easily understand its logic. The game has different mechanics compared to other RTS games. The first of these is that each unit has its own inventory, the second is that you can switch to first-person and third-person angles and control the units. These two features add a tremendous amount of variety to the game. You can add the enemy nation's vehicles or weapon inventory to your own inventory, which feels extremely nice. Being able to repair your units on the battlefield, repairing enemy vehicles you've neutralized and using them by yourself is really nice. I recommend that you should not play the game like other RTS genres, try to play it as realistically as possible. Because that's how the fun comes out. I don't want to give any more spoilers about the gameplay mechanics. The game falls short in terms of performance. I 100% recommend installing it on an SSD. Also, if you like playing on ultra settings like me and taking lots of screenshots, you definitely need 32 GB of RAM, keep this in mind. As for the DLC, I bought all the DLCs except Airborne (will buy) and I'm very happy with them. You can only play as Russia or Germany in the base game, you need to buy the other DLCs to play the other two nations. I give this game an 8/10. Edit : I usually play dynamic conquest mode which is singleplayer . So I don't know anything about multiplayer.

The game shows a lot of realism when it comes to the tank combat and the use of other doctrines is accurate. its a really good game for those looking for strategy and knowledge of mixed warfare.

so amazing ai is bit dumb and manual aim is terrible but i really enjoy the game so far

game was good and added any other tank like germany steal allies tank and added british faction pls

good game, not a bad learning curve, overall decent game

I bounced off this at first as I just thought it was a messy version of Men At War. However, after revisiting, I've realised this is one of the best squad-level RTS I've played. It's like Company of Heroes, but with realism, and detail. Bullets matter. Ammo matters. Armour thickness makes a difference. The campaigns are interesting, and the Dynamic Conquest aspect works, although I hope it gets some more attention in the future as it's functional but feels a bit thin. I've not played Multiplayer so can't comment. It's a mix of the Blitzkrieg Series, Close Combat and Company of Heroes. All in all, the best WW2 RTS I've played. Well worth a look.

one of the best ww2 RTS/RTT games out, any fan of this setting should definitely play

Great details and good balance between strategy and occasional FPS game play. Missions are well designed, and the dynamic campaign has potentials, but got repetitive quick as long as you spend points in researching tanks first. I did however enjoy the tank battles and be able to reuse enemy vehicles. AI pathfinding felt awkward at times, and AI would just throw all units at you with no coordination. Overall 8/10, and a good successor to MOW1 series.

An extremely fun with friends, and challenging alone. This game is worthy 10/10.

a lot to the game but great graphics and gameplay. if you like WW2 RTS's, you'll like this game

It is such a fun historcal game and if you like tactial WW2 games this is amazing

Enemy A.I mortar literally have dead center accuracy, i lost count the amount of time their mortar hit dead center on my troops meanwhile my mortar crew accuracy is as good as a blind javelin thrower.

Honestly this game is extremely fun by yourself or with friends I say it is a must buy if you like rts along with the other call to arm games.

Lead your division through the Eastern Front. Loadouts are totally customizable. Unit pathfinding/AI is generally pretty good(would be nice to have a reverse-move option for vehicles to retain facing, as in Company of Heroes 3), which is excellent as with time you grow to command larger and larger forces. Staggering amount of depth to the gameplay, massive arsenal of units. You can actually play this game as a third-person shooter, but with the size of battles I definitely wouldn't do it in single-player. lolol More intricate development of trenches and foxholes for defense would be awesome. Research tree doesn't appear to show differences between units, which is less than optimal, but one can just look up the differences. Game is fantastic as it is though. Wow.

the most fun i've had in an rts outside of warhammer in the last decade. the way 3rd person combat + inventory management in the context of persistent campaigns all blends into the tactical rts overhead control- its super fresh and compelling. definitely needs polish, its extremely janky feeling, with animations not really blending well and consistent and hilarious bugs like your character's upper body wigging out. there is also a very active workshop component that is another avenue for fun. all in all this is a fantastic game and anyone who's a fan off ww2 games or grew up playing Command and Conquer Renegade this definitely scratches that itch.

WW II RTS at it's finest! Realistic and fun to play. Can't wait for more from the devs. Keep up the good work.

Absolute masterpiece in the RTS genre of video games. The war simulation is truly amazing the control on troops and reaction is on a whole other level. I fell in love with the game after multiple playthroughs on tutorial and the first couple of missions. This game is worth the time and money. yeah there are some issues and bugs that seem weird but I believe the overall experience completely outweighs any bad issues regarding bugs in the game. Like on the second mission for the german for some reason one of my flak guns slid out the trench, which was weird and astonishing I lost it from such a dumb little bug but overall you still compensate it with other troops covering the field in an equal manner. I know my review is still new and fresh but hoping to beat all the missions in hardcore and review the entirety of the game. After i finish the whole game on easy ill go up a level and gradual complete all campaign mission in that fashion.

Amazing game if you love anything World War 2, good modding community, and lots of replayablility. Has some minor bugs and crashes but is still being updated and fixed to this day, and you wont mind because the game is just that fun. 10/10 just pick up the game and dlc's on sale

Does what it want to do, be a immersive experience of ww2... you get too see (at least some of) the horrors of War, it is relatively realistic, explosions and stuff looks extremely real. The only problem is, it can be extremely laggy, you def. Neeed a good computer. And dont give up if problems occur, i had to reinstall the game before i could play, cause it kept crashing. Also, if it is laggy while starting a game, make pause and wait some time, it is a really big game, so be gentle with it.

One of my all-time favorite RTS games, though not really a true RTS. It's more of an RTS/third person shooter hybrid where the third person shooter aspects are janky but enjoyable. The tank combat in particular is excellent and almost like a slightly dumbed down version of War Thunder, but you also manage all your troops at the same time. If you're looking to play alone, the game is pretty decent (although the campaigns are so difficult they'll eat your lunch), but where the game truly shines is in dynamic campaigns done coop with friends.

This is a great RTS game and has some difficult aspects which make it fun to learn. Very well done and Mods are great. Slight stability issues but overall great.

everything i want that is missing in other RTS games is here. Mod community is amazing as well

An absolute fucking scam that they make you buy the very very average Call to Arms base game in order to play this and its DLCs (they might have changed that now idk), but other than that this is an excellent WWII RTS. Some of the singleplayer missions are really cool and feature historic battles that are in no other WWII game. The conquest mode is also pretty fun and challenging, and encourages you to scavenge and steal enemy weaponry which is quite satisfying after a difficult fight.

Do you want to command troops on the front lines of World War 2? Yes? Great how about taking control of those same units? oh now i got your attention Great. This game is great yeah it has it moments when you want to shove a pen in your own eye. But it has so many different units. also the conquest mode is my favorite. 100% Recommend.

I haven't really played a lot of CTA mostly because of my horrible tactics, being new to the game, and the franchise, even with that I still love this game and once I put more hours in and really try to work on my strategy I'm sure I'll really get a lot of hours in this game and will probably update this review. I love WW2 games and this hits that itch I've been needing to get scratched. Every time I see a tank I get all excited and damn near start twirling my hair and when I plan out a perfect ambush I get all tingly and nervous. This game is great, I recommend it to any WW2 enjoyers!

One of the best Call to Arms games that I played. Still needs some work on campaign and on mechanics

Neurodivergent? This is the game for you! Simulation down to individual bullets, with the ability to loot enemy weapons/ammo. My autistic ass spends hours in campaign missions outfitting each of my soldiers with every piece of gear they can fit off dead enemies and i love it. Add in mod support and community missions? My 320 hours at time of writing is exclusively singleplayer and coop in this game.