Product Reviews

Panzer General III introduced the 3D view to tabletop wargaming, allowing you to zoom in, god-like, from above the map. Scorched Earth continues the theme, this time based on the German campaign in Russia, 1941-45. You can play as German or Russian on most maps, with a few speculative ones pitching the Western Allies against the Soviets after the fall of Berlin.

Panzer General is based on commanders, not units. In a campaign, you win promotions, which you dole out as appropriate to artillerymen, pilots and so

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on. The more promotions a commander has, the more his unit can do in a game turn. The downside used to be that the higher a commander's rank, the more space he took up. Late in a campaign, if you employed your best, you could be fighting a major battle with only nine pieces. In Scorched Earth this incredible pain has been removed; you can employ all your best men on every map.

The improvement is largely ruined, though, by lack of testing. When we played as Guderian, creator of blitzkrieg, in our release version of the game, we were ejected summarily onto the Windows desktop. Within days of the game going on sale, its web site had a version 1.1 update to fix precisely this problem, but there's more. If you play as a Russian, many maps also throw you out, just before the end. Moreover, on some maps, the visual clues for movement and attack are displaced, so you can't tell if your piece has the range for a given movement.

Buyers of this potentially excellent game should be refunded for time, agony and download costs. Its project manager should be blindfolded and shot. And no last cigarette.