Call of War: World War 2

The game is incredibly pay to win, but if you get a game without crazy gold spenders you can find that it is actually a really great and fun game with a lot of strategic and political dynamics involved. I just wish the developers would realize this games potential as something other than a payday for them.

Ill summarize the gameplay for you:

I joined a game as the soviet union
Formed an alliance with Japan
Day 3 80% of players becomes ai because of not playing
I invade all of europe
AI's keep telling me to **** myself
I keep ****ing the AI's
South africa joins our coalitoin
We win the game after 20 days of playing
Very good very nice.

I'm enjoying the game a good deal, it's a more simplified version of HOI4 that plays out over the cross of 2 weeks or so per game in real time. The gameplay is fun, and I like the intrigue when it comes to factions. Most of the negative reviews are due to misunderstanding how AI works, being bad at the game or from the understandable P2W aspect. There's two levels of monetization to this game, there's premium and there's gold. Normally, you can't que up more than one building at a time, premium (which is $5/mo) allows you to que up to 4, so while you're offline, it'll automatically start building the next building after the current one is finished. For someone that doesn't have premium and isn't logging in often, not having premium is a definite disadvantage, so beware on that.
The other "P2W" element is gold, which I have no problem with. For every game you play, depending on how you rank in it, you get gold. For a person that ranks 1st with their alliance (fairly common), they get maybe $6-7 worth of gold. This doesn't do as much as you think, so most people end up stacking their gold. If you're in a game with a guy that's been stacking up gold from winning a lot of games, he could (probably) demolish you, however, I haven't saw this myself (seems pretty rare) and on the offchance he IS spending gold, you could get an alliance of people to attack him. Gold isn't an issue in this game, premium does give you some measurable benefits vs other players however.
Putting aside the P2W aspects, people misunderstand the AI. You can tell when an AI is going to be turn on you (its not random), by opening the newspaper or clicking on their nation and seeing what % relation they have with you. If they're at a low relation, they're likely to attack you. If there's a dove and high relation, you're at no risk. The AI is very simple and if you build tactical bombers + rush with motorized inf or tanks, they crumble fast.
It isn't hard to win a game of Call of War, but how likely you are to win does depend on how much time you're willing to spend in game. When you first start a game, immediately create a coalition and invite high level players nearby, this improves your chances a lot. After that, rapidly expand. A lot of players make the mistake of being meek or overdefending. If the person bordering you is an AI, you don't need to defend your borders. Move all your troops at the start to destroy AI and conquer as much land as possible. Upgrade infrastructure, recruiting station, fast troops to kill. If someone has far more land than you, spam motorized infantry and break through his backline, split them and have them attack from 10 different directions and watch him squirm as he tries to recap all the land you're taking.
I recommend this game, give it a shot. I was looking for a game just like this for a while and I'm glad I found this one.

After 300 hours of playtime I must say some things about this game. I started playing the game in november 2023 so I dont have as much experience as many others.
Pros:
If you want to play a free strategy game this is a good pick. A big variety of different maps/gamemodes and also different speed settings (from 1x to 24x). If you decide to play a round with the speed factor of 1 an ingame day takes an entire day. There are many different types of troops to choose from, from the basic infantry to atom bombers. You can create alliances for you and your friends or other people you meet in the rounds you play. What can you do with alliances? You can create alliance internal rounds every month or challenge other alliances. In general the strategy isnt that complicated but it can get a bit complicated if you want to become a very good player. The map designs are very clear so you shouldnt have too much troubles playing as a new player. I mentioned earlier that you can create your own rounds in alliances but you can also do that for public rounds. The customization is ok, I could wish for more but Ill get into that in the cons part.
Cons:
As there are many Pros there are many cons aswell which is very sad for such a great game. As I heard from other players playing longer than me the game didnt use to be as pay2win as it currently is. A lot of bonuses for people with premium and theres the "golders". The word Golders is reffering to those players which kinda ruin the game by spamming troups early on in the round with the ingame currency Gold. Bytro made a lot of bad decisions in the last months or even years with what they did to this game. In early 2025 (I dont remember when the change was) they changed the pale grey maps (except oceans and allied countries) to a more colorful map which noone asked for or wanted. Another change is that earlier you could join a round of another player regardless if you own a premium account or not and now you have to either have a premium account or pay 5K gold to enter any round which is player-made (for alliance games you only have to pay 5K for the historical world war map). Now I wanna talk about creating your own rounds. I think the option that you can create your own rounds is a very good addition to the game but there are far too few settings or choosable maps available and after you created the round you cant change anything to those settings so if you accidentally picked the wrong map (which isnt unlikely) there is no way to change that, you just have to play that map then. One setting of the avaible ones annoys me the most. In one of the settings you can choose the minimum level players need to have to be able to play your round but the thing is the lowest you can go is set by the game depending on the map. Lets say you want to play Historical World War but all of your friends have an account with a level below 17, well thats unfortunate cause level 17 is the minimum level required to play that specific map and you cant even go lower in alliance games which is ridiculous. Also once youre in the game and you picked a country you cant switch your country anymore so you are stuck with that one. Lastly, there is no way to add friends like you can do in most multiplayer games. You can technically only add friends if you create an alliance with them.
You can tell that the cons paragraph is longer than the pros one which is the case but do I still recommend the game? Yes I do, so try it out yourself and experience it for yourself.
(I will edit this review if I should remember some other stuff I want to say)

One of the best strategy games I ever played. Everything is balanced unless you face wallet warriors. So far accomplished many sessions in this game and the overall conclusion is good.

Its alright so far, at the end of the day it is a PC port of a mobile game so you cant really expect much from it. But it is fun in it's own little way I would give it a shot.

Epic strategy game, it requires lots of time but it has amazing battles.