Strategy fans and old school grognards will appreciate Hearts of Iron 3 and likely get a fair amount of enjoyment out of it.
Mainstream gamers should probably look elsewhere, as you're going to need a mountain of patience to deal with the game's grand scale, and the grand flaws that come with it.
From Strategyinformer.com: "A two-fingered salute to any game that even thinks of calling itself a strategy title, the Hearts of Iron series is as hardcore as they come. Hearts of Iron 3 was the third instalment in the franchise, and while it wasn't without its flaws, Paradox have been working hard ever since release to get it to a place that they hope everyone will be happy with.
Johan Andersson has always been a strong voice for the series, as well as Paradox in general. Strategy Informer LIVE is honoured to have him join us for our next event, where we'll talk about everything from the 1.4 patch, to the recently announced Semper Fi expansion."
Altern8 writes: "There are serious strategy games, and then there's Hearts of Iron. I suppose if strategy games were to go in tiers of momentousness and scale, we'd have the twee turn-based likes of Valkyrie Chronicles and Advance Wars at the bottom. Wedged in the middle would be the real-time series such as Command & Conquer, Dawn of War and countless others. The Hearts of Iron series lofts above these like some grandiose zeppelin. It's an example of the relatively rare "grand strategy" subgenre, wherein you don't control miniature men on the battlefield but direct entire nations."
WorthPlaying writes: "There is no arguing it: Hearts of Iron III is an incredibly deep real-time strategy game that requires some pretty high-level thinking. We recently got to play a preview build of the game, and we found that the game is incredibly deep to the point of being overwhelming. Thankfully, you can toe the waters and optionally let the AI handle some aspects of your war machine. Even still, when it comes to the RTS genre, there are few games that promise to be as deep as Hearts of Iron III is shaping up to be."
