Panzer General: Allied Assault

Ending your turn will see your Prestige calculated and added to your reserves - make no mistake, players that burn through all of their Prestige in order to fill the board with units will probably end up hamstrung when it comes to repelling counterattacks from the enemy. Victory is usually achieved by nailing one of four requirements stated at the beginning of the round. These conditions include rushing and taking the enemy's home tile, occupying three or four key objective tiles at once, or simply destroying all of the enemy troop units on the board.

If it sounds like there's a lot to take on board here, that's because there is. It's only through a cautious approach and some blind luck that you'll find your feet. Xbox Live players looking for some instant gratification should go and boot up Battlefield 1943 instead, snipe some fools and not look back. That said, those of you that enjoy pouring over countless stratagems while painstakingly taking the time to appreciate the subtleties of a wicked combat system should be shinning up the nearest flagpole with excitement.

But even though Petroglyph's risky Xbox Live release is supremely rewarding for strategy buffs, it's not without annoyances. The biggest offender is that you can't speed up the combat cycle by clicking a skip-ahead button. You're forced to sit through a repetitious set of informational messages such as "You have no Ability Cards to play" when you obviously know that this is the case.

Occasionally, the random nature of deck draws can get right up your nose. Some campaign scenarios seem to rely too heavily on getting a very specific card or two in your hand in order to make a win not completely out of the question. In fact, you'll probably find yourself 'cheating' every now and again by restarting a map until you get that elusive 'Double Time' Ability card which allows you to advance a unit twice as far as normal to capture a tile before that bastard King Tiger tank beds down for the rest of the war.

Nowhere is this more prominent than when you take your card-shuffling skills online in the multiplayer mode. Multiplayer is a one-on-one affair which lets you face off against another player over Xbox Live. Let's just say this - if your opponent has already beaten the single-player content on the Hard setting, and you haven't, then your weak-sauce custom deck barely stands a chance against their uber deck of ultimate destructive power. You'll quickly learn to hate, hate, hate the German King Tiger tanks and those demonic Flak 88 AA guns. Take my advice and make sure you crunch through as much single-player content as possible before putting your peanuts on the front line of multiplayer - the sting of a humiliating loss against a human opponent is far worse than the pride-filled chest of a cracking win against the CPU.