Theatre of war is now a bit dated. It was once revolutionnary, featuring a full 3D tactical simulator with a high level of attention to details. While some of the scenario settings soon feel somehow unrealistic (well, for a start, if you plan the German, you soon wonder if the Polish army was as mechanized as that ...), the overall gaming experience is rewarding. It was and remains one of the few games to feature early WWII tanks (Somua S35, Polish tankettes, German PzIa,...), scenarios set in Poland or France, crew management and realistic weapons. Moreover the digital version doesn't suffer from the problems some localized retail version had.

Excellent game. Try to think of it as a cross-breed between 'heros of ww2', 'close combat' and 'combat mission' series. Basically what you have here is a tactical game which is true-to-scale, true to timing, true to balistics and so on. It has a good mission editor, map editor, and even a campaign editor (which resembles a lot the campaing editor of 'age of rifles', if anyone still remembers).

Battlefront took what was already excellent (combat mission series) and made it even better. I would say that the main difference is that ToW is in realtime, but pausable so you don't loose control of the action.

Graphics are excellent, which accouts for the several performance issues. As it seems, lots of people had problems with this game. I would suggest reading carefully the troublesooting found in battlefront's website. You can scale down the graphics to make the game run smoother.

Great encyclopedia of vehicles and equipment, with tons of well-researched historic data. Very nice touch, people tend to overlook this aspect in a game but it is nonetheless important.

If you like the above mentioned games, you will not be disapointed with this one.