As a kid, I didn’t understand how to play this game at all. But being an old man now, and with my love to the Advance Wars series, I decided to give it another try. Now I understand why I couldn’t play it, and it’s one of the weirdest reasons.
First, the control scheme is weird, and I guess it’s that way because Amiga had a joystick. Instead of simply selecting a unit, you hold LMB then drag it into one of the four directions, and that selects what you want to do with this unit. You drag the mouse left to view unit stats, you drag it right to show the move options. Weird, but probably with joystick it made more sense.
Second, it’s a turn base strategy game, with a screen divided between you and your opponent. After reading the manual and pressing buttons, I figured out that I control both sides. I went into the options to specify that I want to play against the CPU, but there was no such option. Turns out, you need to complete a few maps in “human vs human” mode, like playing chess against yourself, before you can progress and play against CPU. Weird, weird, weird.
The game also has a strange notion of move and attack phases. Basically you can only move on odd turns and you can only attack on even turns. Your units can counterattack unlimited number of times, though.
I still like the visuals of this game. They resemble Dune 2 art style, and units have this retrofuturistic look.
