Full Ace is properly ace
One of the advantages of spending my formative years in close proximity to two English manor houses (my Dad was a gardener) was my siblings, pals, and I were never far from a tennis court. When these courts weren’t in…
Tag the experiment
New Heights is literally and metaphorically uplifting
Generally, when I spend several hours in the virtual Ardennes, tanks end-up ablaze. This weekend, however, I managed a rare flame-free visit. In launched-last-Friday Early Access climbing sim New Heights the only things you burn are your avatar’s over-worked muscles.
The long and rocky Road to Moscow
Long before 88mm/Slitherine slapped ‘Road to Moscow’ on the cover of a forgettable Panzer General-like in 2014, the moniker was associated with two profoundly memorable wargames. One of these is available today through a number of abandonware sites, the other…
Miniature interview: Ali Hamza (the brains and muscle behind Battle Tactics 2025)
Graviteam, Black Hand Studios, Freedom Games, Matrix Games, 1C… you can count the devs that have attempted to produce Combat Mission-comparable 3D tactical wargames on the fingers of one hand. Counting the devs that have actually succeeded arguably requires just…
Lock ‘n Load Tactical Digital’s forty pence ‘demo’
I don’t recall Lock ‘n Load Tactical Digital’s vitals ever being as attractively priced as they are right now. Besides tutorials, the core game may only include two WW2 and two Vietnam War scenarios, but as those scenarios cost, in…
Bloody hell (Battle Tactics 2025 is going to be brutal)
The Bangladeshi dev behind Battle Tactics 2025, an upcoming Unreal Engine-powered Combat Mission-like, refuses to draw a veil over war’s grim realities. Combatants in his high-fidelity RTT/TBT are going to lose limbs and buckets of blood in the line of…
Review Reprise: Apache Air Assault
I’ve written hundreds of reviews and previews during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, and involve titles largely forgotten today, now and again…
Alex Williamson is a one man wargame factory
Over the past decade the proprietor of Asymgames.com has crafted around seventy computer wargames. All are free, equipped with competent AIs, and playable online, and many explore the kind of relatively obscure conflicts, ops, battles, and historical events that bigger…
Traction inaction (Where are the traction engine sims?)
The steam-powered tractors/tractor units of the Victorian era and early 20th Century have reason to cast resentful glances at fellow transport forms like the aeroplane and automobile. Bar a few flimsy Farming Simulator mods, they’ve been completely ignored by sim…
Nuclear Option has a NovaLogic feel
As Prigozhin seems to have cancelled his insurrection, I think I can drag myself away from Twitter and the TV for long enough to type a few lines on Nuclear Option, a ‘coming soon’ combat flight sim with some seriously…
Hard Truck 2 – the first true trucking sim?
SCS Software have been making truck sims for so long and so dominate the sector, it’s easy to forget they didn’t invent the genre. That claim to fame, I’d argue, belongs to Siberian studio SoftLab-Nsk – more specifically a chap…
Type:Rider – fontastic and (almost) free
Unsurprisingly, Steam’s sub-50p bargain basement is awash with concentrated effluent. Without a robust hazmat suit and prodigious patience, you’ve zero chance of unearthing marvels like the (currently) 39p Type:Rider.