A Sabre Team is an SAS four man fire team and the game uses this to allow you to play as all four members of the team in a turn based game. It covers many different scenarios from clearing terrorists from a building and rescuing hostages to completely wiping out a terrorist stronghold in the jungle. You are given a certain number of soldiers to select from a list to make up your four man sabre team used for each mission and a certain amount of military equipment from the stores to load your team with for use in each mission.
One word of warning the ammunition you use in each mission is not replaced and any equipment carried by a team member that is killed is also lost permanently so I advise you pick up any weapons and equipment you can find on any dead terrorists. Each soldier you can select has his own skills and strengths and weaknesses and is given a points score for various things, stamina, marksmanship and also a movement score that will change depending on how much equipment he is given. These movement score points are used in the game to allow this soldier to perform his given tasks so in each turn you can only use the player when he has enough points to carry
out the tasks you give him.
It’s a bit like playing some board games but on a computer. In the game turns you, the SAS have your go first allowing you to use each soldier in turn then the computer (Terrorist) has their go which unless their figures are in the view of your own soldiers will not be seen. It might take a bit of a hang getting used to and the later missions can get pretty difficult but when you get used to the game it is good fun. The armory at your disposal has many items in it body armor and respirators are good but as they are heavy they reduce the movement points for your soldiers when worn. One thing that is a real disadvantage in this game though is that when you load a weapon it takes four action points to cock (make ready) the weapon and the game insists that you cock any weapons that is not capable of automatic rates of fire each time after you discharge it. So every time you fire a shot from a bolt action rifle (the L96A1 Accuracy international sniper rifle it must be reloaded at a cost of four movement points) however all semi automatic weapons (e.g. L1A1 SLR) are treated in this way and this particulary annoying as it makes these semi automatic weapons a real drain on movement points.
The graphics aren’t too bad. You can tell what items are and what objects are representing, but don’t expect things to look photo real and the figures shown on the screen aren’t that large that you can see real detail in them. But they do their job and allow you to see what’s going on.
Overall, it might be a bit old now, but it’s worth a play. 7/10
