"Second Front: Germany Turns East" is Gary Grigsby's remake of his 1984 title "War in Russia". He would go on to remake that title a second time in 1993, but that is another story. This is the well-praised 1990 wargame about the eastern front, one that took the genre by storm when it came out. It had a brand new graphic engine and deep gameplay, in which you could view your order of battle down to individual units, at least in statistics. The PC version had no mouse support, but was very playable with a keyboard. It is interesting also in that it looks quite a bit different than its sequel "Western Front" which introduced those recognizable but rigid "menu" buttons that you could click. Here you have none of that, but rather a very simple but stylish interface. The engine itself is very responsive and fast. Of all Grigsby's wargames of this era, this is my favorite along with "Carrier Strike". But like that game, Second Front was released with a bit lackluster graphics. Luckily, there have been tools available for dealing with some of these games (Thanks Rich Dionne!). This has made it possible to improve such issues. For a good introduction to the game itself, please check out the PDF files in the links below. In them you'll find articles from magazines of the time.

The mod available here simply changes the NATO style symbols to more immersive icons, they should be self explanatory. It also enhances the terrain visuals and makes the disctinction between weather conditions better. Snowy conditions still leaves a bit of woods visible, a blizzard in Russia is now a real white-out hell, which it by all accounts was. Rain will make the landscape muddy and murky and so on. You will also find there is an improved title screen included as I found the original to be very noisy. I hope these changes makes the game experience enjoyable all over again. To my best knowledge the game is completely abandoned and so I have taken the liberty of including the whole thing (version 1.1, de-protected) with the mod already applied. There is also a little configurator I made in there, which you can use to enable/disable the mod, view the manual, launch the game, etc.

Second Front - SturmPixel Mod 1.0

Second Front - Manual (Text)
Second Front - Copy Protection Help Card
Second Front - Command Summary Chart
Second Front - Original Advert Poster

Reviews:

Second Front - "Game Player's" Review
Second Front - "Strategy Plus" Guide

New title screen assembled from
the original source material.