From: arseno@phy.ulaval.ca (Henri H. Arsenault) Subject: ONslaught mini-review I bought Onslaught yesterday before seeing the demo (that should teach me!). I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is not much good news. It wouldn't run on my PPC 6100; I decided to take it back, but I remembered that I had seen a patch on Sumex mirrors, so I downloaded the patch and it worked. I'm sorry I didn't take it back. Maybe I missed something. The game was fairly stable, it crashed only once in four or five hours of play. There are many kinds of WWII style units, two kinds of airborne units three kinds or armored, bombers, dive bombers, fighters, etc. You can send planes on patrols to attack any nearby enemy planes, and so on. There are al lot of innovative features. There are about 10 different maps (small, large, huge, long, tall, etc), and the terrain for each one can be configured by the player (percentage of rivers, mountains, forests, etc). The game supports network play, and units capabilities depend on many factors. Units get tired and need supplies from cities. So much for the good news. I decided to watch while the computer played itself. Not exactly, because you still have to tell it to play every turn (one week of game time). I never say such a high density of units in a game: I estimate that a full 30% of hexes were filled with unnits, some of them stacked as high as four or five! I this suposed to be a game or a carpet pattern? I tried a variety of maps and starting situations. Each time the result was the same: both sides line up along the border stacked three or four units high and three or four units deep, and a massive and endless slugging match ensues. After more than 100 turns, none of the armies were more than one hex away from the border! If you save the game, the default name proposed is appropriately "Slug fest"... The makers claim that they wanted to emulate a WWII kind of conflict, and they have sucessfully done so as far as units are concerned, but as far as combat goes, this is WWI trench warfare at its worse. Hey guys, the essence of WWII combat is mobility! The only mobility you see in this game is units moving behind the lines and airplanes attacking targets.Never in five hours of watcing the computer play iself did any unit ever get across the enemy front. I desperately searched inside the game folders for some scenarios. "Thiscan't be it", I thought, but it is...How can a game maker imagine that anyone can have fun playing a game where you bash away at the enemy for hours on end while nothing happens? This game has a lot of interesting innovative ideas (the terrain generator is not one of them: every "randomly" generated map looks the same), and implemented with a variety of scenarios a la Panzer General or Perfect General II (two of the best PC wargames available), and some challenging AI,this could become a great game. As it stands, I found this game as exciting as watcing grass row. My gut feeling is that the original intention WAS to have scenarios, but the beancounters pushed the game out the door to profit from the Summer buying spree. And there IS a shortage of good new wargames for the Mac The best are still TacOps and the WatW series). Not everyone is as fortunate as I am to have a Mac with a PC card so he can play all those great PC wargames... Sorry guys, you bungled it. Henri