Previous Next

Crete 1941 - it sounds suspiciously like one of your Auntie Vera's holiday snaps albums, doesn't it? But in actual fact, Auntie Vera would have been pretty daft to have holidayed in Crete in 1941. There was quite a serious battle raging there at the time, you see, and she could easily have got caught in the crossfire between the invading German paratroops and the defending Australian and New Zealand divisions under the command of General Freyberg. Bad news for Crete's tourist industry, then, but good news for CCS who've decided it was about time they simulated it.

Or perhaps not it you've just joined me from that review on the other side of the page and are casually expecting the same sort of running-about-killing-people bits. This is just a simple strategy game, you see (which means lots of rather-dull-in-comparison squares, movement phases and morale levels).

The great difficulty when it comes to reviewing a war game is trying to work out how exactly it differs from all the rest of them. Well, I've examined this one in some depth and I've ascertained that a) it's set in Crete, b) it's probably a bit more complicated than usual as you've got air attacks to consider, along with paratroop drops and capturing airfields, and c) it's got a few 'interesting' features like roads and troop evacuations. Graphically its about as dire as these things always are, but the blue coloured squares beloved of wargamers do their job reasonably well, I suppose. I have to take issue with the scrolling, though - it's just a bit too slow and jerky to be comfortable. Presentation generally is unadventurous (wargame programmers still don't seem to have discovered that there are alternatives to the Sinclair character set).

So if wargames feature highly on your list of pleasurable activities you'd be daft to miss out on Fallschirmjager (as it's cryptically subtitled). After all, new ones are pretty thin on the ground these days and this one's got some pretty devious strategies and things lurking in there somewhere. Now where did I put that SdKfz 2? (Eh? Ed)

Um... a wargame, really. And quite a good one into the bargain.