Another War

If you thought Allo Allo was the apex of TV comedy, and that games have gone backwards since the early '90s heyday of point-and-click adventures, then get ready for the game you've been waiting for all these years. Another War is an RPG/point-and-clicker where you play a debonair English mercenary caught up in a Nazi occult plot during WWII.

You select your character from a paltry three character classes and improve his skills by spending skill points, accrued from combat expenence as you go. Played out from an isometric top-down viewpoint, the game lurches from sub-Diab/o-style click-heavy combat, to tedious point-and-click exploration. There's a huge amount of reading to be done, with every object you examine throwing up a long-winded explanation, and every character initiating a meandering conversation. Another War's twee humour is frankly tedious, and as is so often the case in these games, it makes for obscure puzzles that can only be solved by wandering round speaking to everyone and clicking on everything repeatedly until you stumble onto a clue.

The locations look nice, the animations passable, and the sound effects and music are pretty good, though lacking in speech samples - hence the reams of text. Combat is a simple matter of clicking on your foe repeatedly to attack, or initiating 'lazy mode’ and hitting 'enter’ before sitting back and watching your man do the business for you. It's both oversimplified, and annoyingly easy to lose. Realism is not a selling point here, with most characters more deadly with their fists than a sub-machine gun.

We can't really see who this is going to appeal to. unless there are still fans of those old Terry Pratchett-based point-and-clickers out there. If you're not one of them, just don't bother.