W is for Will WARCOM: Fortress Europe need interesting battlefields and solid AI to realise its full potential? While it’s impossible not to be excited by Broke Protocol’s vision and ambition (the dev aims to fuse traditional WW2 hex operational wargaming with turnless tactical 3D battle orchestration) the simplicity of the scenery visible in Warcom’s trailer raises the spectre of tactical insipidity.

Then again, maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. If BP can deliver promised features such as “angle-based armor penetration and realistic ballistics”, “suppression, morale, cover, and line-of-sight in full 3D” and “an adaptive AI that flanks, suppresses, and counterattacks” perhaps it will be possible to overlook a bit of characterless topography.

X is for Xpert-led

Designed by Vincent Bernard, one of France’s foremost experts on ‘la guerre de Sécession’, SGS: Battle for Gettysburg comes with four alternatives to its 47-turn centrepiece. Two of these, the Battle of the Ridges (8 turns) and The First Battle (6 turns), are focused on the preliminary clashes west and north-west of the town, and should help series newcomers get comfortable with the game’s relatively simple card deck and somewhat unorthodox treatment of artillery.

Y is for Y buy Early Access Battleship Command?

1. Serious WW2 warship sims are almost as rare as Kriegsmarine aircraft carriers. 2. WW2 naval gunnery procedures have never been replicated this faithfully before. 3. You don’t have to fight alone. Bracer provide taskable cruisers and destroyers. 4. Multi-day trans-Atlantic patrols are possible. 5. Every Scharnhorst-class battleship comes with three functioning Arado Ar 196 floatplanes:

Z is for Zeewolf cub

Pillar of the race sim community Tim Wheatley has, like me, spent the last five months up to his neck in warm code. Interestingly, the first fruit of his foray into game development isn’t a top-down Grand Prix sim or an ASCII rally-em-up, it’s a retro chopper game inspired by one of his first loves, Zeewolf.­ Blue Fury’s natty features include randomly generated terrain and smart self-reliant non-player units. By the sound of it, buyers won’t be breezing through the 30-sortie campaign on Day One: “This game is hard. It starts off a bit easy and there are ways to do things that appear to make it easier, but the AA rockets are deadly – so stay low – and the helicopters can take you down in seconds. You literally do not have enough ammunition of any kind, so you can either fly with strategy, re-arm and go into battle again, or you can try to take out the primary target and RUN. It’s up to you.”