"Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943" is an ancient game from 2009. It's a whopping 15 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware.

This is a WW2 themed RTS, and there's a strong demand for such games, but unfortunately it's very dated and has a lot of problems... this should be a slam dunk but implementation issues and lack of modernisation means most gamers won't be able to truly enjoy the Africa theatre Ww2 battles this game promises but now fails to deliver.

On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.

The game doesn't correctly account for modern PC displays, UI scaling isn't handled correctly. As a result of this unfortunate decision, text and UI elements don't display at a reasonable size, it's too small to be legible on most modern gaming PCs, and there's no in-game controls or options to correct this. This can render the game unplayable for many.

The game is now extremely buggy due to the developer not maintaining the game (but still asking gamers for money for it). The game crashes a lot, it's likely to crash very shortly after starting any mission or battle... this instability isn't acceptable and I can't recommend anyone put themselves through trying to play this.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Walking Dead", "X-Com: Enemy Unknown" or "Just Cause 3". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.