Developed and released by SodaLogic in 2005, Cuba Libre is a military tactical FPS depicting an alternate history where Brigade 2506's landing on the Bay of Pigs in 1961 went as planned, leading to a revolution in Cuba and the downfall of dictator Fidel Castro's regime. The game features a large arsenal, large scale battles, and a large amount of bugs.

Game Modes

Players get to experience this war that was never fought in single and multiplayer. Singleplayer spans eight missions as you push from the beachhead, to Trinidad, through the mountains and into Havana to unseat Castro's communist militia from power. Multiplayer lets teams of 16 battle it out on modified versions of the same maps. Skirmish mode allows you to play multiplayer maps against bots on either team.

Development and Release

SodaLogic was a developer mainly known for budget real time strategy games with high unit counts. They capitalized on the growing WW2 FPS genre in 2003 with Days of Glory, a budget priced game following the European campaign from the American's point of view. Thanks to good modding tools and hardware-friendly graphics, Days of Glory was an unexpected hit. They monopolized on it, quickly pushing out the multiplayer-focused expansion Pacific Hell and the sequel Red Zone, set in the Pacific and Eastern Front respectively. Red Zone introduced the so-called "battalion AI", basically reusing some of the AI from earlier RTS games to fill up the maps with AI controlled soldiers. While a good idea, it was poorly optimized, tanking framerates and lagging multiplayer matches to a crawl.

After Red Zone underperformed, they quickly reused the assets from it and the prior Days of Glory games to make a standalone expansion, which became Cuba Libre. It scaled down the maps and the unit counts, added new weapons and abilities, and a whole new campaign. Unfortunately, it was a little too late to market. By 2005, bigger and better games like Call of Duty 2 were dominating the market and Cuba Libre looked pretty shoddy in comparison, still built on a souped up version of Quake. It was unfairly disregarded by critics, and only gained a small cult following for it's unique balance of tactical skill, realism and snappy gunplay.

Here's a few choice reviews from the so-called "critics":

Greg Kasavin, for Gamespot

Red Zone: Cuba Libre feels stiff, clunky and out of date. Only recommended for the hardcore military shooter fans sick of the current WW2 fixations. 4/10

Hugh Wallaby, for IGN

SodaLogic may have moved their game to the other side of the globe, but the gameplay is still stuck in 2003. 2/5

Adam Sessler, for X-PLAY

Just like the actual Bay of Pigs, Red Zone: Cuba Libre is an embarrassmet. A 1 out of Five.

Community Support

Say what you will about SodaLogic's game design skills or lack of polish, they were very good about supporting the community until their bankruptcy in 2007. The level editor GloryEd was released to the public in 2006, and they listed many mod sites on their home page (unfortunately, before this sites time *sigh*). There is still a small active community playing Cuba Libre, the original Red Zone and Days of Glory, primarily out of Poland. Check out some of their sites in my links section.

Legacy

While SodaLogic may be dead and gone, developers from it's ranks have gone on to work on many AAA games in recent years. Hopefully we see the return of Battalion AI, and hopefully another developer will be brave enough to take on the setting of 60s era Cuba. The IP rights for Red Zone are still held by the Polish publisher, so who knows- maybe one day we'll see another one... we can always hope...