The Commandos: Origins demo is reassuringly reverential, great fun, and très jolie, but while guiding Tiny and Fins to the mission objective – a coastal radar station in need of demolition – I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played…
Imagine Door Kickers and SWAT 4 colliding in a gloomy tenement hallway, and after realising that their tac vests were hopelessly entangled, pressing on regardless. Imagine a sad fox playing a violin while drifting towards the lip of a waterfall…
The French ATR team that bagged an armoured car last turn spend this sixty spooning rocks and hugging dirt. Despite the best efforts of the Gallic mortar team which uses all but one of its white-painted M302 rounds this turn,…
Air Goons aren’t short of ambition. The organisers of Under the North Star, a multiplayer wargaming experiment without parallel, want to sim the response to a fictional Russian invasion of Northern Scandinavia using a host of off-the-shelf PC games and…
Early Access Ships at Sea came within a cod’s whisker of flunking its 3×3-style audition. Two hours in I was railing against its rigid earn-to-unlock structure and unexpected lack of ambience, and fast losing patience with its improbably choppy harbours…
It has been this way since the cock-up in Cologne. On the day before a deployment, King Dormouse summons me to his office, and we play ‘the contacts game’ while he wipes the nicotine film from his gig-lamps or toys…
I can’t look at Heavy Cargo – The Truck Simulator screenshots without thinking of one of the UK’s most idiotic rail accidents. In the released-yesterday-to-luke-warm-Steam-reviews, HCTTS, I presume the procedure on arriving at a level crossing isn’t “Wait for automatic…
SPOILER WARNING. The spat between Corporal Bignon, Team France’s unlucky anti-tank rifleman, and this cocksure cannon-armed Afrika Korps armoured car comes to a lethal conclusion this turn.
Street Cleaning Simulator, Garbage Truck Simulator, Utility Vehicle Simulator, Stone Quarry Simulator, Underground Mining Simulator… in 2011, German publisher Astragon was pumping out so-so sims like a Flakpanzer Gepard pumps out Shahed drone shredders. Confronted with this deluge of dross,…
The reason why Combat Directive: Napoleonic Wars is possibly the only hexy turnless wargame sold on Steam, is the same reason why your local supermarket doesn’t stock tomato and banana soup or broccoli-flavoured yoghurt – some fusions are simply terrible…
Old prejudices die hard. Although Ada’s hard drive is as capacious as a Zeppelin hangar, and download speeds in rural Wessex are no longer narrowboat slow, I still wince when I go to download a game and see double digits…
Spare a thought for simmers who prefer their rudders and propellers immersed, their rails and bridges spray-flecked. Compared to a Parker Knoll plane or train operator, the armchair ship/boat skipper has few choices and relatively high outgoings.