Soft Games - IGNTalon. Soft focused on military based gaming, with titles such as Jetfighter IV, Age of Sail, and Rising Sun. Download East Front 2.

2nd Approach Constructivist Edition Elementary Grade Middle Social Study here. East Front II is an operational level, hex-based wargame from Talon Soft. Actually an update of the original East Front, this new version includes all the original scenarios patched and with improved graphics, plus 50 new scenarios and another 50 fan-made scenarios. (totaling 150). New options include rules like 'extreme fog of war', armor facing, and other tweakings=.

Also available is a campaign game mode, plus multiplayer support by modem, IPX, E-mail and hotseat for 2 players. Installation: 1.

Mount and install. If the autorun doesn't start, please open the Setup.exe program manually. Find the shortcut in Start / TalonSoft / East Front II Works under WinXP PDF Manual included.

It's a curious fact that, while most Americans know next to nothing about the Russian Front during World War II - in fact, many don't even know there was a Russian Front - it is by far the most popular theater amongst WWII wargamers. Partially this is because the sheer enormity of the campaign, both in time and space, allows for a wide variety of scenarios, anything from the dramatic Russian winter counterattacks in front of Moscow to the urban meatgrinder of Stalingrad to the massive tank battles of the Kursk offensive.

And if you add the drama inherent in the titanic struggle between Communism and Nazism, you're looking at a situation with some pretty strong game potential. Plus, as any treadhead will tell you, you get great tanks. Unfortunately, up to now Russian Front PC games have been few and far between. Sure, Steel Panthers and Panzer General had plenty of eastern scenarios, but only a few games have been dedicated to the Great Patriotic War (as the Soviet historians call it) and fewer have been memorable - the venerable Kampfgruppe, Avalon Hill's Stalingrad, the V for Victory series' Velikeye Luki. But mostly the East Front gets overlooked as game companies churn out one Battle of the Bulge game after the other.

With the release of East Front, Talonsoft attempts to do its part to fill this void, and to do it in a big way. East Front covers the entire war, from 1941 to '45.

And though the game is tactical and the units platoon-level, you can command either side at the company, battalion, regimental or even (for those monster gamers out there) corps level. With a campaign game that allows you to fight the major campaigns of the war and a series of scenarios designed by a 'who's who' of wargaming - Richard Berg, James Dunnigan, Mark Herman, Dana Lombardy - East Front promised to be the big one that WWII gamers had been waiting for. Does it live up to that promise?

OK, let me lay my cards on the table. I had enormous expectations for this game. First of all, it's put out by Talonsoft, a company whose games I unreservedly recommend to anyone whom I can collar. They made their name with the terrific Battleground series - a run of well-designed, historically accurate, handsomely documented, colorful and fun games covering major battles of the American Civil War and Napoleonic era. East Front is the first game of their new campaign series, and while my expectations were probably too high to be satisfied by any game, East Front falls quite considerably short of them. Don't get me wrong; East Front is a good game once you manage to get it running and figure it out.

But numerous bugs, miserable documentation, and uneven graphics conspire to foil what woulda coulda shoulda been a great game. The biggest gripe I have with this game is that it was clearly released too soon. Evidence of this? Well, how about the fact that Talonsoft has issued three patches in the three weeks since the game hit the shelves, and they still haven't completely debugged the game. Until I downloaded the first patch, my game regularly crashed during the first or second battle of the campaign game, and less serious glitches plague the game - especially in the generated campaign scenarios. At the beginning of many of them, I find my troops well within range of the enemy, often with my artillery and headquarters units in the front lines.