The Day After: Fight for Promised Land

The Cuban missile crisis, 1962:13 days where two nuke-toting superpowers gazed rigidly at each other, the world's fate hanging in the balance. In reality, the Soviets were the first to blink, JFK was hailed as a hero and everyone went back to listening to their Elvis records/queuing for borscht (delete as applicable). In The Day After's alternative reality, things didn't go quite as smoothly. In a 'most-of-the-world-died-in-a-hellish-radioactive-firestorm' kind of way.

So now we're in the aftermath, with four world powers (the USSR, the Chinese, an Anglo-American alliance and a Franco-German coalition) coming to blows over the earth's remaining resources and uncontaminated land. 1960s conventional weapons are the tools of the trade here -tanks, infantry, jets - and the medium is basic RTS gameplay with a smidgen of turn-based strategising. The RTS bits are very much in the vein of Sudden Strike or Blitzkrieg. A typical level sees you given a small group of tanks, a couple of field guns and a handful of foot soldiers, and then tasked to capture an oil refinery or munitions factory. It's basic (if devilishly difficult) stuff, and a major step down from the likes of Soldiers: Heroes of World War II.

The turn-based portion enables you to move around detachments and build extra units, but if you're expecting the intricacies of Rome: Total War's world map, prepare to be sorely disappointed. Still, if you like your strategy games to actually contain strategy, you could do a lot worse than this.