Men of War: Assault Squad

The most effective units on the field are elite infantry. Each of Assault Squad's five playable nations (Germany, the US, the UK, Japan and Russia) brings its own variety; the Brits get the SAS, while the US get Rangers, for example. They tend to rock up in their own troop-carrier which affords them the luxury of mobility from the moment they arrive – and by gum, do they stick around.

You can have the whole squad thrown skyward by a direct hit from a high-explosive shell, and more often than not, they'll dust themselves off and toddle onward. If they're then hammered by further fire, they do start dropping, but if you're careful with them, they can achieve amazing feats of derring-do. With plenty of anti-armour capability, they're truly multi-role. Used well, they actually seem a little overpowered.

All 15 missions (each nation gets three historical battles of its own) can be played co-operatively, and here's where the game really comes into its own. The challenge is so much more enjoyable with two or more players, as each player advances along his own line, and supports his buddies when the need arises.

All players can order up fresh units from the shared pool of requisition points. It's pretty random as to who ends up owning them when they appear, but units can be donated to other players, so it's not really a problem. There's a beautiful sense of camaraderie when a friend is under fire, and you send a tank or two chugging over to his flashpoint, click the unit-sharing icon and hand control over to him.

The maps themselves are worth a mention, and each has a flavour and a pace all its own. The light cover afforded by the sands of North Africa offers a remarkably different experience from the bocage and urban warfare of Caen, for example. And while the destructible scenery looks great, it also has a meaningful impact on the battle.

One particular British mission sees you mounting an assault against a German-occupied dockyard, which is lorded over by the sentinel gaze of three 88mm fixed emplacements and a couple of howitzers. It's death-on-a-stick in the open, but fortunately there's a small settlement of huts and houses to provide cover on the approach.

The enemy has no compunction about throwing shells at civilian buildings however, so if you stall your infantry in the buildings and lose momentum, the settlement is soon reduced to planks and cinderblocks. With that cover destroyed, you can expect enormous losses in your next advance.

Assault Squad is not all roses, though. The interface can be sketchy at times, informing you that vehicles are repairable when they're plainly not. Units occasionally get glued to terrain features and suffer pathfinding glitches. Plus the lack of any scroll-keys is a constant irritant. Granted, you're lucky to get WASD-control in an RTS, but not even being able to use the cursor keys to scoot around the map? That's just so Windows 95.

The lack of endgame creativity is also a little saddening. The final stages of Assault Squad's 15 missions fall into the same category of experience every time: conquering a ton of brutally powerful fixed emplacements with numerous overlapping fields of fire. By this point, you'll have access to off-map artillery, air strikes or some other ranged god-strike, but that just makes it too easy; the fun lies in cracking the missions with ground forces. Playing on anything but the easiest setting makes this fiendishly difficult to accomplish, however.

As annoyances, though, they're far from fatal. At its best, Men Of War: Assault Squad provides hours of tactical chin-stroking, some stonkingly memorable engagements, and a whole kit-bag of replayability, especially in co-op. It's also got my belly rumbling for the upcoming Vietnam expansion, with its promise of cover-heavy jungle action. Until then, I'll be over here, merrily tinkering with banged-up Panzers.