Game of the Week, Aug. 31–Sept. 6

From August 31 through September 6, this week’s Game of the Week is Squad Battles: Red Victory, featured at 25% off. Beginning in the aftermath of Stalingrad and ending amid the ruins of Berlin, it follows the Red Army’s long advance from survival and recovery to the destruction of Nazi Germany—one village, river line, railway embankment, and city block at a time. It is the culmination of a wider Eastern Front story in the Squad Battles series: Squad Battles: Winter War examines the Red Army’s harsh earlier conflict with Finland, while Squad Battles: Advance of the Reich takes the struggle from Barbarossa to Stalingrad.

Red Victory is compelling because victory on the Eastern Front was never a simple matter of pushing west. Soviet commanders must assemble artillery, armor, engineers, and infantry for a breakthrough, then keep the momentum before terrain, supply, and stubborn German counterattacks close the gap. The German player faces the inverse problem: how to use mobile reserves, prepared ground, and local firepower to delay an enemy whose strength grows with every campaign season. At squad level, the vast war becomes more direct: a crossing site held, a flank secured, or a single strongpoint reduced can decide whether an operation continues or stalls. For players who have fought the earlier campaigns in Winter War or Advance of the Reich, Red Victory is the chance to carry that evolving war to its conclusion.

From Stalingrad to Berlin

The Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 changed the character of the war in the East, but it did not settle it. Operation Uranus had encircled the German Sixth Army, and the Red Army’s subsequent offensives had pushed deep into southern Russia and threatened to cut off Army Group A in the Caucasus. Yet the Soviet forces driving west were themselves exhausted, extended, and often short of fuel and ammunition. Their winter successes had opened an opportunity, not delivered a final decision. Germany still possessed experienced formations, capable commanders, and the ability to concentrate armor at a threatened sector.

That capacity was displayed during the Third Battle of Kharkov. In February and March, Erich von Manstein gathered mobile German formations and struck Soviet spearheads that had outrun their support. The counterstroke retook Kharkov and Belgorod, restoring a more coherent German line. Its effect was strategically limited, however. The Germans had recovered ground but could not replace their losses indefinitely, while the Soviet Union was learning to coordinate larger formations and to preserve reserves for the next phase of an offensive. Both sides now looked toward the Kursk salient, where the front bulged westward around the city.

„Der Krieg hat hier ja Formen angenommen, die den Dreissigjährigen weit übertreffen.“

“The war here has assumed forms that far surpass those of the Thirty Years’ War.”

— Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, 10 October 1943

Operation Citadel, the German offensive against Kursk in July 1943, was intended to regain the initiative by pinching off that salient. Soviet intelligence and reconnaissance gave Stavka time to prepare deep belts of mines, anti-tank defenses, artillery positions, and operational reserves. The German attack gained ground at great cost but failed to achieve the breakthrough required for success. At Prokhorovka and across the southern face of the salient, the fighting demonstrated the limits of armored attack against a defense designed in depth. When the Soviet counteroffensives began—Operation Kutuzov against Orel and Operation Rumyantsev toward Belgorod and Kharkov—the initiative passed decisively to the Red Army.

The campaigns of late 1943 showed how Soviet methods were maturing. The Red Army no longer relied only on a single shock; it planned successive operations, using reconnaissance to identify weak points, artillery to rupture them, and mobile forces to exploit into the rear. The advance to the Dnieper demanded speed as well as brute force. German commanders hoped the great river would provide a defensible eastern wall, but Soviet troops crossed wherever they could establish bridgeheads, frequently with improvised boats and under heavy fire. By the end of the year, the Germans had lost much of Ukraine’s industrial and agricultural wealth, while Soviet armies had gained positions from which they could threaten the Balkans, Poland, and the approaches to Central Europe.

The scale of Soviet operational power became unmistakable in Operation Bagration in June 1944. Timed to coincide with the Allied landings in Normandy, the offensive struck Army Group Centre in Belorussia. Soviet deception measures persuaded German headquarters that the main danger lay farther south; concentrated artillery and coordinated attacks then shattered the front. Minsk fell, whole German formations were destroyed or driven back, and the Red Army advanced into Poland and the Baltic region. Bagration was not simply an advance across empty space. Railways had to be repaired, bridges replaced, artillery ammunition moved forward, and formations reorganized as rapidly as they fought. Keeping an offensive supplied could be as decisive as opening it.

«Слава нашей победоносной Красной Армии! Слава советскому оружию!»

“Glory to our victorious Red Army! Glory to Soviet arms!”

— Joseph Stalin, 23 February 1944

In 1944 and early 1945, the front became a struggle across several routes to Germany. Soviet armies drove through Romania and Bulgaria, where the political collapse of Germany’s allies transformed the military situation. Other formations fought through Poland, Hungary, and East Prussia. The battle for Budapest was especially costly, combining siege warfare, relief attempts, and brutal combat in a capital city. German counteroffensives around Lake Balaton in March 1945 showed that the Wehrmacht could still assemble dangerous armored forces, but they could no longer alter the balance of the war. Soviet reserves, artillery, and air power absorbed the attacks and resumed the advance.

The Vistula–Oder offensive of January 1945 carried Soviet forces to the Oder, within striking distance of Berlin. In April, after hard fighting on the Seelow Heights, the final assault began. The battle for Berlin compressed the war’s largest strategic issues into streets, parks, railway yards, and government buildings. Soviet commanders had to bring massed firepower into a devastated city while maintaining coordination among armies converging on the capital. German defenders used rubble, cellars, barricades, and the remaining armored and anti-aircraft weapons to make each advance costly, but the city was encircled, and the Nazi regime was collapsing. Berlin surrendered in early May.

Red Victory places the player inside this transformation of war. The Soviet side must turn accumulating strength into a combined-arms attack that does not lose cohesion in the breakthrough; the Axis side must make every defensive position, counterattack, and withdrawal purchase time. From the recovery after Stalingrad to the last fighting in Berlin, the question is not merely who holds the ground, but whether local tactical decisions can preserve—or break—the operational line behind it.

What's in the Game

• Red Victory includes 97 Scenarios – covering all sizes and situations, including specialized versions for both head-to-head play and vs. the computer AI.
• Includes 37 unique maps ranging in size from 900 hexes to 86,400 hexes covering both Russia and Eastern Europe.
• The Order of Battle includes German, German SS, Luftwaffe, Russian, Russian Guards, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and Russian Naval soldiers.
• Extensive documentation, including two 91-page Visual Order of Battle documents and a 65-page Vehicle and Weapon Encyclopaedia.
• Unit component, Order-of-Battle, and Scenario Editors, which allow players to customize the game.
• Map & Sub-map editors allow map creation and any of the included maps to be "chopped" up into smaller segments for custom scenario creation.
• Red Victory provides multiple play options, including play against the computer AI, Play by E-mail (PBEM), LAN & Internet "live" play, and two-player hot seat.

Book recommendations

Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945. London: Viking, 2002.

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Revised and expanded ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Mawdsley, Evan. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Nash, Douglas E., Sr. From the Realm of a Dying Sun: IV. SS-Panzerkorps and the Battles for Warsaw, July–November 1944. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2020.

Töppel, Roman. Kursk 1943: The Greatest Battle of the Second World War. Translated by Geoffrey Brooks. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Military, 2023.

Ziemke, Earl F. Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2002.

Screenshots

We hope you enjoy this week’s Game of the Week: Squad Battles: Red Victory. Like all WDS titles, it provides countless hours of rich historical gameplay at a very attractive price.