Virgin provides a great experience in this very solid, classic game. It is played almost entirely with the mouse, so if you’re emulating DOS, you’d better be sure you have full mouse compatibility.
The game play is pretty simple: you start with a few soldiers who enter into an easy battle and must eliminate the enemy soldiers. Most battles have more than one mission, and at the end of a battle your remaining active soldiers are promoted based on the number of missions they were involved in.
You receive more soldiers between battles and you can see the graves of those soldiers you lost. You can look back fondly over the crosses of privates, or purposely get a specialist killed to see what his gravestone will look like. Of course the battles get more complicated as the game goes on.
Your soldiers start out in one squad, but you can break them apart into more units to cover more of the map, or to attack two sites at once, or bait-and-switch or ambush.
You start out with just firearms, but soon are introduced to vehicles. The environments change from jungle to icy tundra to desert, so the scenery is interesting. Sometimes enemy soldiers hide in the scenery, sometimes they come out of barracks,
sometimes there a booby traps. The graphics are dated, but it’s a DOS game, what can you expect?
The learning curve is very kind to new players, but there is no story to speak of. I found that I got attached to my soldiers and would quit battles to restart them if I lost a high-ranking soldier.
You are able to save between battles, but this is often not enough. Suppose the current battle has 4 missions. You’ve just finished the first 3 though missions and are quite proud of yourself, but THEN you get a soldier caught in a booby trap. You must now decide if his life was worth it and keep playing through, or going back to the beginning of the battle (3 missions ago) and try again without loosing ‘Jools’ or ‘Jops’. You'll find yourself caught in many tough situations where you've run out of grenades or destroyed an important vehicle and you'll have to restart. But if it came too easy it wouldn't be worth it!
This is a very fun game. I actually paid for it many years ago, and it was well worth it!
