Reviews

R. T. Smith is a name that's familiar to most people who play wargames on the Spectrum and this is his first published game. Where most early wargames restricted you to a single scenario, often not even based upon anything resembling the real world, Confrontation offers you the chance to recreate just about any conflict in the history of modern warfare on any scale. There are a variety of units on offer from the staples of armour, infantry and artillery to specialist kit such as air support and anti-tank. However, with just a single screen map, you'll still need to use your imagination a bit in most cases. There's one scenario on the tape, and a couple more tapes of ready made ones covering everything from WW2 to the Middle East.

This also isn't the most playable of wargames. Written largely in BASIC, and with a cumbersome interface, it's rather slow and you'll need to constantly refer to the manual when getting started. The character-per-square map graphics can be confusing and aren't terribly pretty either. It's also a 2-player game, with no computer opponent, so you'll need to find someone similarly minded to get much out of it. Back in the day, I could count such people on one hand, whereas there was never a shortage of people wanting a game of Chaos or Viking Raiders.

Although a promising indicator of things to come, and one of the few Spectrum wargames that allowed you to create custom scenarios, this was never brilliant and has aged quite poorly. Anyone who isn't a die hard strategy head should probably skip straight to Smith's next game; Arnhem.