Strategic Command 2: Blitzkrieg

When My Grey square - the one with the oblong drawn on it - flopped onto the hexagon marked 'Moscow', an unlikely exhilaration coursed through my body. What this curious, unsightly meeting of geometric shapes represented was the fall of the Russian capital to my veteran German Panzer divisions, and seeing it happen after a long, hard-fought Eastern Front campaign frankly made me want to abuse myself.

Strategic Command 2, like its predecessor, looks about as bad as a PC game can get. A rudimentary map scrawled from North Africa to Norway, little squares with arcane symbols etched on them representing armies and not an explosion, texture or even a polygon in sight. But despite this, with its no-nonsense turn-based gameplay and simple though deep mechanics, it lets you re-fight the entire war in Europe, controlling everything from researching new weapons, recruiting new armies and influencing other nations to join your cause. This is strategy gaming at its most megalomanic. Land your Panzer armies in Norfolk and overrun the home counties. Invade Switzerland for being such layabout, neutral wastrels. Pound Paris into dust from the air, simply because you had to pay $6 for a beer there once. Western Europe is your war-despoiled oyster.

It's a return to cottage industry games design, and is no bad thing for it. Because with no board of investors to answer to, the team behind Strategic Command 2 have fashioned an effective, old school strategy game of properly strategic proportions.