There's more interface blues – you can't view stats, or even character names, while outfitting your men. To the game's defence the fact that men are displayed with their weapons is a plus – it's easy to see who has the bazooka. One is that in combat you can't step through your men's inventories, so if you want to find out who has the wire cutters you'll have a lot of scrolling and clicking to do. The design is poor, certainly for a modern game, and where lessons should have been learnt from the likes of Wages of War. The main weakness of Soldiers at War lies with the interface. You can load and edit with any of a dozen or more tilesets. But being able to build small villages, churches, vineyards, and much more is really neat.

delete only applies to one tile as far as I can tell) and the designer window doesn't autoscroll when you're drawing out a big terrain block. Its only flaws are that 'mass corrections' are hard to do (ie. This lets you create seven-level maps and missions with relative ease and is probably the best editor of its type that I've seen.

In addition you can also make your own custom scenarios with the superb editor. Each mission sees you pick up to eight men, equip them, then jump into the heart of the action. For game balance purposes many weapons are in short supply (at any of the difficulty levels) though you can recover some useful items within missions. You'll have to manage your equipment and troops, the focus of the game is on the tactical action. Unlike X-COM there's no strategic wrapper to the game, you're just dragged from mission to mission through the campaign. There's plenty of options to select, such as hidden movement and general difficulty settings. 'The game's prime drive is a series of around fifteen missions in which you take a pool of 32 men through the war fighting special operations as and when directed by your superiors. Tim Chown of Games Domain says it all on this underdog marred by a cumbersome interface: The game is a superior sequel to Wages of War, also developed by Random Games. Soldiers at War is one of SSI's last published games, a valiant attempt to capture the feel of WWII in a squad-level game similar to X-COM.

Soldiers at war computer game