Men Of War: Assault Squad is, I think, an interesting concept for a quasi-sequel. Many of you will not have played Men Of War, fearing this talk of micro-management, difficulty, and fiddliness, and that is a tragedy, because it will – for some of you – be precisely the game you are looking for. Yes, the default comment made in reference to the game's eccentricities of design is that hats can be shot off the heads of all the characters (why aren't they wearing them with chin straps!) but the truth is that the hats thing is simply a measure of all the other details in there, from being able to enter any building, to looting every fallen soldier on the field. Men Of War is so rich as an experience because the details are so many, and so diverse. Using a stolen pak gun to hold off an enemy advance while soldiers patched up a series of fallen tanks was just one in a million little victories, while instructing a soldier to throw a Molotov cocktail (looted from the inventories of the dead) only to have it smashed on broken scenery and set him on fire, one of a million tiny disasters. Playing Assault Squad has led – via the complexity of managing our little men – to some of the most inventive and heroic game events I have ever seen. It's precisely this depth that makes the game so rewarding, too, of course. In a battle with hundreds of units, this can become breathtakingly tricky. Their positioning, their retreats and often, even, their specific ammo and targeting, must be managed by you. And while these tiny heroes will shoot and take cover and dive away from grenades (sometimes) they do require meticulous management. You responsibility is not for resource collection or base building, but simply for the men on the field.

Dozens of units, destructible scenery, intricate physics modelling. Men Of War is, in many ways, a technical marvel. That original template is one of pure tactics, high fiddliness, and extreme precision. Assault Squad does not deviate far from the template of its origin, and for that I am thankful. I have spent more happy hours with it than any other. The original Men Of War, I should probably admit, is the real-time strategy that interests me most of all. But there are some caveats to that, obviously. The fifteen skirmish maps are all excellent, and are close to constituting a new campaign in their own right. Up front I want to say one thing: people who were worried about the skirmish and multi-player focus detracting from the single-player challenge have nothing to fret about. I've already been spending a lot of time on the beta, but now we've been able to look at the full thing. We were lucky enough to be the first publication to get our hands on the complete build of Men Of War: Assault Squad, and I've been reviewing the hell out of it.

A little bit of a world exclusive, this one.

Man of war assault squad