WarCommander (PC)

War Commander…Rangers go in first? Yeah, I suppose they could go in first, if they didn’t get blown to bits or caught on the various bits of the map/scenery. I mean this had the potential to be a Sudden Strike beater and it landed on the beaches of Normandy like a wet blanket. I’m sorry but the only redeeming feature about this particular game I can find are the missions themselves, but they’re let down by lack-lustre and unfortunately twitchy gameplay. Sure the graphics are pretty ok, with nice terrain deformations and explosions…there’s day and night as well, along with weather but it’s all let down miserably by the interface and the actual way your Soldiers react and behave – the AI is simply terrible.

They don’t actually feel like the 2nd US Ranger Battalion at all but a collection of 11 misfits, who’d rather throw themselves into the line of fire, stare dumbly at the direction they’ve been shot in and just gawp as they die. More Captain Klutz than Courageous. Which is a shame since if they’d have made the GUI and the AI more user friendly – it would have been a real pleasure to play. Orders seemed to take an age to carry out and highlighting and selecting units required the manual dexterity of a Chef (Cross trained with a Ninja Death Commando) to pull off.

The organised movement of your troops is damn near impossible and serves to frustrate and annoy, along with the chattering gunfire and the cries of ‘Medic’ that break through now and again. You’ll be happy to take it back to the shop and demand they give you a refund. Because even though it’s deeper and more intimate than Sudden Strike it just doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Soldiers often blow themselves up with grenades because they lack the skills to actually understand there’s an object in the way.

It might look nice, but looks does not a great game make, so I can’t recommend this at all over Sudden Strike – and to be fair I gave it a good crack of the whip. Missions are great and nice and varied, but the appalling lack of control and AI of your units just sinks this into the mud where the great Abraham’s tank of destruction rolls over and hides it forever. A pity since this could have been much more like Saving Private Ryan than A Game too far.

Still there are 40 missions, and a 8 player network option, so someone might take pity on it and give it a good home. And I’m sure someone out there will disagree with me over this, I really do quite enjoy matching wits with some of our readers who can’t be bothered to come up with a decent reason why they don’t like what I say.