Commander: Europe At War (Military History)

Being a more mature DS type, I see-sawed on this one for a while, and finally plunged in. I am old enough to remember the old Panzer General type games, and this is very much a chip off that block.

Historical details and facts are informative without being intrusive, and I found myself having "just one more turn" quite a lot! I was concerned that the "grand scale" may not have worked on the compact and bijou DS, but I found myself not noticing that after a couple of bashes. The zooming helps focus the wider picture, and the political and research elements add enough to make it a little more interesting.

The powers are nicely balanced - after smashing through the Low Countries, Denmark and France, I decided to quickly launch across the channel and snuff out those perfidious shopkeepers - to be thoroughly smashed by an all conquering Navy and RAF!

If you like your DS games a little slower paced and strategic, I would highly recommend this. Much more variation than End War, which is the closest equivalent I can think of.

This game is a simple plug and play feature that does exactly what it says on the tin. It would pay well to read the instructions before you play as some will find that there is a lot to remember from a tutorial that (in this rare scenario) does not treat you like an idiot. However, as I have mentioned there is a tutorial and the options do allow you to restart the tutorial as you play. The tutorial is useful and does not hinder play or make you do actions but instead shows a scroll box full of the implements of the game as you encounter them.
Simply put, this game is good for those that like Turn based tactics games and simply poor for those that expected to get call of duty world at war. If games like FF tactics, advance wars 1 and 2 and Prince of Persia the card game was your cup of tea then this is the mother of all purchases. Its riddled with stats, figures, the ability to buy things and about 100 times the depth of the DS version of age of empires.
The ability to use certain parts of terrain to a tactical advantage is gone in this game as the sheer scale of the map means you are walking through cities represented by dots in one turn. However the hexagonal system more than makes up for this as you can be attacked on six sides rather than four and naturally you can make more in depth defences.
Unit interaction is something to be desired at the point of play that I am on but being a bit on the nerdy side of world war games and the strategy genre, this is something that I can get over quite easily. There are a good selection of battles to go from and the choice of both sides at the time. This game is definitely worth a little play around with, make no mistake. Hope you all enjoy it.

I got it thinking it would be a sort of Call of Duty meets the DS, far from it, there is no real story and the controls are awkward. The grpahics is apauling and confusing. I wouldnt recommend it.