The crew at Atomic Games have done it again. OPERATION CRUSADER is their latest brainchild, in the lineage of the V FOR VICTORY series. Grab your sunscreen, and those shades, it's off to North Africa we go. OC lets you explore and replay the gritty sands around Tobruk in late 1941. Choose to be Gott of the British, or Rommel of the Germans and marshal your forces. Play one of six scenarios, or take 'em all on with the campaign game. Fight the good fight for country and honor.
Anyone even remotely familiar with the V4V series will feel right at home with OC. The look and feel are the same - that is, everything's right at hand; examining your units and the surrounding territory is easy as pie. Movement couldn't be simpler - just click and drag, and your 'assistant' determines the best path. Your objectives, the weather, detailed reports, they're all just a mouse click away.
One of the most impressive things about OC is the ability to turn over as much (or as little) as you like to your Executive Officer. If you want, you can let him to *everything* from planning to airstrikes to movement, for your forces. Or, you can just let him do all the things you don't want to - assign supply, plan air support, and move units you don't want to deal with.
The interface is smooth and polished; I can't think of one thing I wanted which was not easily available. And the graphics - stunning. The desert looks formidable just from the graphics; the army pieces look so real you think you can just shove 'em around, like you used to do with boardgames. And the 'nighttime' graphics do a good job of showing the difficulty of engaging the enemy after dark.
The enemy AI appears quite good (though I'm not the one to test this, really!). Sporadic attacks will net you very little - planning, mobilizing your forces, and exploiting the enemy weakness is the only way to gain your objectives.
There's enough in OC to keep any wargamer happy for a long while. In addition to the scenarios, there are a number of variants, each of which changes the relative army strengths. By toggling different ones, you can effectively handicap the game to provide more (or less) of a fight from the enemy.
Screenshots are from the Macintosh version, but as in the past, the PC version should be essentially identical.
This preview is Copyright (C) 1994 by Chuck McMath for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.