POLISH your helmet and grab hold of your weapon as we charge into Battlefront's Combat Mission 2 the tactical Second World War strategy game.

This combat simulator recreates the battles in Eastern Europe immediately following the German invasion of Russia.

The game contains 60 campaigns, which involve seven different nationalities (German, Soviet, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and Polish).

It also allows you to play it in either two player mode or online.

The first Combat Mission caused a storm in the war-gaming world and many people felt it pushed the genre forward, however, two years down the line this doesn't have the same feel about it.

The game is played in two phases firstly the orders phase where you tell forces what to do by using your mouse to select the troops and then pointing to where they should go.

Once you've issued your orders you then click the Go button and the computer decides what it's going to do.

Then the game jumps to the action phase and for 60 seconds your weird-looking troops slowly make their way towards the waypoint you set.

Depending on the setting you selected for the "fog of war", you will probably not be able to see the enemy troops, who only appear when one of your units spots them and this makes the game so much more difficult.

Once the action phase is completed then you get to issue more orders to your troops.

When the action phase has begun you have to sit back and watch as your men move forward and possibly engage the enemy, but you can't issue any more orders.

It always seems as if the computer has out-thought you and there's nothing at all you can do about it.

This makes the game quite frustrating and only for those hardcore war-gamers out there who need a real challenge.

However, there are lots of campaigns for you to play through and if that isn't enough you can create your own and you can always change the setting so the enemy is visible.

The graphics are rather poor and don't seem to have moved on from the game's first outing very much.

The sound doesn't add much to the atmosphere, but this is war and they didn't have poncey music playing in the background then either, so it does add to the realism.

However, the clumsy interface is difficult to pick up and the manual, which runs to 80 pages, is about as easy to read as Japanese stereo instructions.

A training section within the game would have been far more helpful to allow people to get in this game quickly.

However, the developers tell us this will flex our minds and not just our fingers and with an unreadable manual like this I think they're not wrong.

On the whole I was unhappy with the way I had to play the game this stopping and starting began to grate upon me after a while and I craved for some real time action.

This game felt too much like playing chess against an opposition I couldn't see and this made it exceptionally difficult.

In fact, I'm not sure the computer played by the same rules.

However, those people who were desperate to get hold of the first game will no doubt rush out and buy this next instalment.

For the rest of us, I imagine, this is one game to miss.

Overall: 2.5/5

January 28, 2003 16:00