Producer: PSS
Retail Price: £9.95

The Clash of Armour is the subtitle of this latest game from the admirably prolific PSS, and were in the desert once more: a locality increasingly familiar to wargamers. But there's no need to worry about getting sand in your boots playing Tobruk, because, as the packaging suggests, tanks are the main fighting units in this campaign.

Tobruk is a medium-range simulation of Rommel's attempt to break through a vast minefield laid by the Allies in North Africa between Gazala and Bir Hachieim to defend Tobruk, a key Mediterranean supply point. By medium-range I mean that it doesn't recreate a single battle, nor does it present the player with a long-term extended campaign. The action covers a little over a month, starting on May 26th 1942, and combat is resolved in a single turn. The aim, when playing against the computer - as the Axis side, for you do not have a choice - is to capture as many of the Allied bases as possible. Tobruk, up at the top right-hand comer, is the ultimate goal.

The main display map is a visually uninspiring representation of Cyrenaica, with the Gazala Line - the Allied minefield - cutting the desert in half. According to the rulebook the minefield was only half-completed when the offensive begano and it is presumably because of this that there is a way round the bottom of the line. The Axis troops begin the game on their side of the line, and all the oasis targets - and the Allied forces - are on the other. Identification of every part of the map is easy, because a Com Box, similar to that in Battle of Britain, can be moved over any feature, whether unit or landscape, for an instant report. There are few features on the map anyway. It is sand, sand everywhere.

Enemy units can be examined by use of the Com Box just as easily as friendly units, and the defensive strength of oases is displayed too. The system is smooth to operate, easy to understand, and unambiguous. Data given on units includes their strength in terms of supply of infantry, provisions and artillery, and the number of moves the unit can make that turn.

There are two turns a day predictably divided into Movement and Combat Phases; a Supply Phase and a Command Phase occur every second turn, at the end of the day. Units can be moved at the player's leisure by means of the Corn Box, in a way which is again identical to the Battle of Britain system. Units do not have the option of committing suicide by passing over the minefield, unfortunately; it's treated as an impassable obstacle. Entering an enemy zone of control (for the relatively uninitiated, that means the squares immediately surrounding the enemy unit) arrests movement, though combat is not inevitable.

The Com Box doesn't let you plot out a movement further than the movement allowance of a unit, which I found a useful restriction and reminder. Movement orders are executed immediately, something else which helps in organising forces. When all units have been moved, pressing the space bar moves the game onto the combat phase. In this phase, unusually, combat is an option which has to be selected. And here, unless you've turned the thing off in the start-up menu, we hit the infamous PSS Token Arcade Sequence.

I gave my views on this in my Battle of Britain review in my first column. In Battle of Britain, which is a fast-moving, real-time game, the distinctly tacky arcade sequence did not seem impossibly out of place. In the middle of this traditional cardboard-counters strategy wargame, which has no other element of moving action, this sequence clashes stylistically on every level. As might be imagined, you are put in charge of a tank. As is not so self-evident, you are presented with an iconmenu of tank functions; the gun turret, shell loading and firing and navigation.

To turn the tank round you have to select the navigation mode, and trundle the vehicle about defenceless while being fired upon, then switch hurriedly to the gun turret to fire back without being able to move. I found I was just able to pick tanks off by firing shells at them, because the shell-firing mode allows some mobility. The whole thing is stunningly badly designed and unplayable. It has quite an attractive on-screen appearance, in contrast to the main body of the game, and bears all the hallmarks - though I don't know the inside story - of quite separate authorship. Tobruk loads with the arcade sequence deselected, and I would advise you leave it like that.

Unless you're trying the arcade sequence, combat is resolved speedily and simultaneously and retreats and surrenders reported. Units always seem to surrender; you aren't given the satisfaction of a 'division completely obliterated' report. The supply phase follows, and the player is asked to decide which units will receive the limited resources available. The importance of supply in a desert war is emphasised by the fact that the Axis forces have to trundle their mobile supply bases after their forces, and protect them from the enemy. This factor adds a lot of interest to the gameplay, because if both of the supply dumps are destroyed - and they are extremely vulnerable - the Axis side automatically loses.

The command phase moves onto another screen, whore strategic disposition of resource points is decided. Points can be put into things like AFV (armoured fighting vehicle) recovery to minimise losses after battle, and, importantly, into ground strikes and mine laying or lifting. Putting a sufficient number of points into mine lifting allows the Axis side to make a neat break in the Gazala Line, to get some of the slower-moving units through quickly. Ground Strike allows the choice of one bombing target, which mayor may not have moved by the time the order is executed.

The instruction booklet is neatly printed and entirely adequate, providing a short but informative summary of the historical situation and guiding the player briskly through the mechanics of the game. There is, however, a lack of obviousness in the layout which makes particular things difficult to find afterwards, but there are lists of the units and their properties, command points and their strengths, and the obligatory bibliography to show that the designer has done his research.

Tobruk is easy to pick up, quick to play, and devoid of long-term interest. There are no skill levels, which is a serious omission, and on my first bungling attempt, when I was just trying to pick up the rules and wasn't sure exactly what I was doing until a couple of turns in, I won. The game has a bit of a hook in its very smoothness and simplicity of objective, but despite the strategic trimmings of the command phase, there's nothing in it to satisfy for more than an afternoon.

PSS
£9.95

The war in the desert was very much a to and fro affair, and by May 1942, it was Rommel's turn to make a thrust for Tobruk, taking in as many allied command points as he could. It looked like a simple sweep from west to east, but it was complicated by a broad strip of mines running the length of the map. The only ways round were at the extreme north and south.

In one player mode, you are Rommel, though you can have two player mode, when one of you plays the German commandant and the other plays the Allied commander. Tobruk's your goal and if you're the Allies you have to defend against invasion while attempting to disrupt Rommels'supply lines and strength.

Control round the single battle screen is by the cursor and movement is in stages - first the Axis forces move and attack, then it's the Allies turn.

The Germans are rather short on reinforcements, but they can strengthen themselves in the three key areas of infantry, armoured fighting vehicles and supply. To benefit from supply, though, every unit must be able to trace a line back to the nearby supply point. Because of this, the supply points must be carefully protected. Once you've supplied your troops you can set up special missions for some of your units, such as attacking a target or clearing a path through a minefield. Depending on what's happened during other stages of the game, you may be forced to hold back your attack because your units took heavy damage or because you're waiting for air support.

Tobruk provides an interesting challenge. The rules aren't that difficult to understand, so beginners won't give up in despair, and there's enough in it to give a good strategic puzzle.

Label: PSS
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Tobruk is pretty disappointing. It's an attempt to marry strategy gaming with arcade gaming, in much the same way as PSS did with Bismark, but it's nowhere near as successful.

To begin with, you get the usual wargame-type map, this time of the area of North Africa around the port city of Tobruk - a very important location in the campaigns in North Africa during the second world war And to the right, a window giving status info - strength, supplies, etc.

The map is pretty bare, except for a few escarpments and an enormous minefield, which separates the two armies from each other. Allied units are character squares with dark bands against white backgrounds. Axis (German and Italian) units are black crosses against white.

The game's either one or two-player and, if one-player, the computer will control the Allies. To order your troops, you put the white open square - the command box - over a unit, hit Fire, move the cursor to the desired location, hit Fire again.

If you're next to an enemy force, then you can attack it - use the cursor to choose which units are attacking, and who they're going for and, if you've chosen to play with the arcade action screens, then you can pick one battle per turn to 'participate' in.

The arcade screens are a bit like a cross between Battlezone and Commando, but not half as good as either. You can choose to drive the tank, fire its machine gun, or use its turret and main gun. But you can only do one of the three at a time, and it's not easy switching.

In drive mode, you race around a patch of desert, getting shot at by enemy tanks or machine gun posts which pop up every so often. It's a bit frustrating, being able to chase things but not actually shoot at them. In turret mode, the situation is reversed. You can shoot at enemy tanks, and track them, but you can't chase after them' in machine-gun mode, you can shoot at whatever's on screen, but you can only fire in front of you - you're machine gun is fixed, not in a turret like the main gun. All very confusing .

The two halves are linked - the better you do in the arcade section, the better you are going to do in combat in the wargame part But to be honest. I wasn't really that interested. The problem with this one is that it's neither one thing nor the other: the wargame bit is boring, and the arcade sequence is clumsily executed.

STRATEGY AMID THE SHIFTING SANDS OF THE DESERT IN THIS WWII WARGAME.

PSS
£9.95

Death in the desert is the theme of PSS's Tobruk strategic tank wargame that also includes an arcade sequence. The game can be played either against human or computer opposition in which you play the Germans and their attempt to take Tobruk. At the time of the attack the allies had only half finished laying a huge minefield. The line, although incomplete gave the Germans an imposing barrier that they must either go round or get their engineers to find a way through. On the other side lay their target, six oases that supplied the allied forces.

As with most wargames Tobruk is played in a series of turns in which the opposing armies move their forces and attack the enemy. Positioning a joystick or keyboard controlled cursor, the identity and strengths of a unit can be displayed which includes a measure of its infantry, artillery, armoured vehicle and support strengths and its mobility factor which determines how many squares it can move through in a single turn. Obviously this is affected by terrain and whether the unit is well supplied. All units on both sides need supplies that provide ammo and reinforcements otherwise they will rapidly weaken. Consequently, Tobruk is as much a battle of support as it is for ground.

The Allies gain their support from the six target oases and will retreat as these are taken. The Germans have two mobile supply units that can service any unit within six squares. So if you keep our troops together you stand a better chance but be sure you protect the supply trucks or your game will be lost.

Tobruk differs from most wargames with the addition of a vital command phase. This phase allows you to assign your air support and engineers to six different missions. The air support can be assigned to maintaining air superiority, and support ground attacks. Similarly the engineers can be ordered to recover damaged armoured vehicles for repair, sabotaging enemy tanks and mine clearing. Each mission is represented by a coloured box which changes colour as you and the enemy assign support. Red means the enemy's ahead in that mission, yellow indicates that no-one has got advantage but green means you're ahead: if you get a green in ground support then you have an airstrike or free attack against any enemy unit. A green in mine clearing will clear a square of mines. Clear enough and you might catch the allies with a surprise attack.

As with previous PSS Warmaster games, Tobruk also contains an arcade sequence that tests your abilities as a tank commander.

By pushing the joystick you can select between four tank stations in an attempt to blast as many enemy tanks as possible with your allotted ammunition. This system works quite well but it will take some practice before you can swap between the map machine gun, main turret and driving screens quickly enough to stop your forces taking a beating. Since your performance affects the result of all your battles it's best to avoid this arcade sequence until you've had a chance to practice.

Even without the arcade sequence Tobruk is still one of the best wargames I have ever played and is highly recommended for both gaming rookies and wargaming veterans.

GOING TO BATTLE

War simulations are becoming ever more popular Tom Courtenay examines some of the best.

War games have come a long way from the time H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars at the turn of the century. He wrote it as a result of trying to regulate the battles on the Kitchen table against his friends involving a handful of pained tin soldiers. These days, war-gamers revel in the complexity and realism of their simulations - ify ou call it playing soldiers they would be very upset. Any game worth its salt will involve tape measures, dice, sets of tables, vast numbers of troops, or even cardboard counters representing regiments or divisions.

So it is scarcely surprising that the home computer was welcomed by the war-gaming lobby with open arms. Two approaches were taken: either the computer could be used to referee a traditional war game fought on a table-top in traditional manner, or the whole thing could be transferred to the computer.

The pioneer of the latter approach was Lothlorien, which began to produce war games written in Basic on the Spectrum. Obviously they look primitive by today's standards but they attempted to be accurate representations of historical events. To the mainstream games enthusiast, they played slowly and you could not kill anything.

The first truly modern game was Nato Commander from Microprose. It takes place in northern Europe and features that almost constant American obsession, the Reds pouring over the border and trying to take over Europe. The game covers the most critical period, between the initial invasion and the U.S. getting huge reinforcements to the front. Thus, the Nato commander is severely outnumbered and is fighting a delaying action, trying to hold on to as much ground as possible, and possibly inflicting significant losses on the Soviets.

However distasteful you may find the scenario, it is a very good game. Success depends on falling back in stages, each rearguard action allowing time for the forces to the rear to dig in, then fall back, and so on. In that way, the steam is taken out of the Soviet advance. Any Soviet forces not in contact with friendly forces may disappear from the map, depending on how many aircraft are flying reconnaissance missions.

Aircraft can also run air superiority or ground attack missions. It is important to keep open supply lines and make the best possible use of terrain. The computer opponent is fairly intelligent, although by following particularly outrageous tactics it might be very confused.

Microprose recently followed this with Decision in the Desert and Crusade in Europe. They are a real tour de force. Covering two famous campaigns in WWII, they are about as near to a board game on a computer as you are likely to see. Almost everything is there, the different strengths and weaknesses of units, use of terrain, supply - in both strategic and tactical senses - fog of war, and a two-player option.

Again, the computer could be a little lacking in the old grey matter, especially when called on to defend, but the two-player option is what the game was about. Both games feature several different scenarios which portray different battles within the campaign. Although the games can be long, the speed of play can be varied to slow things when things become difficult. Orders are made in real time - the battle does not stop while you input orders. Tactics are very subtle. All-out effort rarely works; you will just run out of supplies and exhaust your troops. It is all about probing for weaknesses and then exploiting them quickly. The games are on C64, Atari and Apple.

Microprose recently capped even that success with its chart-topping Silent Service, in the same three formats, with ST, Amstrad and Spectrum versions promised. It is a superb simulation of submarine warfare in the Pacific. Almost without being aware of it, the player is subject to many rules about sighting, detection, firing and hidden movement. It knocks spots off all the board games devoted to the same subject - and you can shoot things.

You command one submarine on patrol in the Pacific. After a convoy is detected, a quick squint through the periscope to see whether its worth the risk - how heavy is the escort? Then check the time. Should you wait until dusk? Check the speed and course of the convoy. What is the best attack course to evade detection? A little on the slow side for the shoot-'em-up fraternity but a superb and exciting simulation which will take some beating.

That is not to say British programmers are not starting to get their acts together. Particularly Robert Smith, who has produced two fine simulations, Arnhem and Desert Rats, published by CCS on the Spectrum and Amstrad.

Another company specialising in this field is PSS. It has attempted to popularise the genre by including an arcade element in most of its games. Unfortunately that tends to mean the realism of the game suffers - precious memory and development time is lavished on a rather tedious shoot-'em-up.

Neither is the company a stranger to controversy. Its titles include Theatre Europe, all about the jolly little subject of a European war escalating into a thermonuclear holocaust. The scenario is much the same as Nato Commander but the addition of a complex air war, the arcade sequences and the thermonuclear option has left in its wake a rather dull land game.

The game falls between four stools. Falklands '82 was another landmark of good taste. It features the Argentinians and the British locked in a struggle to save their respective governments from the wrath of the electorates. The game stayed mainly with the land campaign, and it aroused much anger as it demonstrated the possibility of the British losing - something fairly obvious to anyone of even a semi-rational disposition.

Possibly the company's best game to date is Battle of Midway, about the decisive carrier battle in the central Pacific in the middle of 1942 which effectively ended Japanese chances of winning the war. The player controls the American task forces in an attempt to seek and destroy the Japanese aircraft carriers protecting an invasion of the American base at Midway island.

Although the tactics employed would make most military historians turn pale, it is not a bad game. The player has to find, identify and then shadow the enemy task force as, his strike aircraft close in from his carriers. Naturally, the enemy is trying to do the same, or even get to grips with his surface units. The player must plan his raids, try to evade the enemy, and control the strikes, making sure they find their targets and have sufficient fuel to return to their carriers.

The same system was developed further in the PSS Battle of Britain. It covers the Luftwaffe attempt to destroy the RAF in the summer of 1940. The main pre-occupation of the player is to preserve his fighters, taking on the Germans only if he can do so on favourable terms. There are problems; after each interception the fighters must land, re-fuel and re-arm. The nightmare is that a German raid will catch the fighters on the ground. The campaign is fought through several turns, with the British meeting raiders as their losses permit. It is a long game, of slightly dubious accuracy, but a fascinating struggle.

On the same subject, Their Finest Hour from Hutchinson is a flawed attempt to be a real simulation of the battle. Although highly-detailed, some of the mistakes are almost laughable. First, defensive flak can zip from target to target as if on wheels; ME109s have huge fuel tanks, along with the Spitfires which also have inexhaustible ammunition. Time and again, a squadron can shoot down 200 aircraft and usually the Luftwaffe is defeated on the first day. It is a pity, because it had the makings of a fine game.

The most recent PSS game returns to the Western Desert, Tobruk, on the Amstrad, features an exceptional network option where two Amstrads are connected using the joystick ports so that two players can battle with highly-realistic Fog of War. Neither can see each other's pieces. The game design is a little artificial, with the British having fixed supply dumps and the Germans being able to zip around at will but it is a fine game which is great fun to play.

Most of the games have been set in WWII. If you crave for the age of the horse and the cannon, there is a grave shortage of quality material from that era. The Lothlorien Waterloo and Austerlitz are not bad. Although they lack detail, the games go some way to recreating the Napoleonic era, but if you are looking for dramatic cavalry charges, forget it.

Possibly the best thing Lothlorian has done to date is Jonny Reb, a semi-abstract simulation of tactics in the American Civil War, seen in retrospect as the transition from the Napoleonic to the modern era. As firepower became more formidable, so the only way to stay alive was to take cover. The infantry charge became a rather rare commodity. That is dealt with very well in this game. The Confederate army's job is to try to take a bridge from a small force of troops before a large number of Union reinforcements can arrive.

The tactic is to move up men with covering fire from artillery, then open fire with the infantry. If that does not work, send in the cavalry as a last resort - demoralised troops will tend to run rather than face a cavalry charge. Endless variations of troops and terrain can be tried with a kind of battlefield designer.

The major criticism is that such a complex game has completely inadequate instructions. The terrain is placed there with little explanation of its effects. Despite that, and the usual monumentally thick computer opponent. It is a game which will reward plenty of experimentation.

Computer war games have progressed a long way from their humble origins but they still have some way to go before they reach the level of accuracy and subtlety of most board war games. Perhaps the new generation of 68000-'based machines might just fulfil that potential.