Airborne Assault: Red Devils Over Arnhem (Panther Games, PC)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * * )

While D-Day usually gets star billing in World War II, a stylish little campaign called Operation Market Garden almost upstaged it in September, 1944.

It was conceived by Britain's top general, Bernard Montgomery, who was becoming increasingly frustrated by Allied supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower's lack of progress after D-Day.

Monty came up with a bold plan to capture strategic bridges across the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem. This would allow the Allies to bypass Germany's formidable defensive system known as the West Wall, and end the war by Christmas.

Essentially, Allied paratroops would secure the bridges, opening the way for a direct thrust into the Nazis' industrial heartland.

But it ended in disaster, with 71 per cent of the 11,290 Allied troops dead, wounded or taken prisoner after just nine days.

Airborne Assault: Red Devils over Arnhem is a historically accurate representation of this battle and gives you the chance to do better than Monty.

Don't expect whiz-bang graphics with 3-D characters as in Medal of Honour: Allied Assault.

That game concentrated on small-scale platoon missions around the D-Day landings, but Airborne Assault is on a much grander scale, and the player controls thousands of units over battlegrounds of hundreds of square kilometres.

It is a full-on, serious war game in which players pit themselves against some of the best German and Allied generals.

The game is played on a highly detailed Ordnance map, which shows troop positions and objectives as icons.

The map is zoomable, but icons stay as just that, and progress of a battle is shown by status bars, detailing such things as a battalions, casualties, equipment, fatigue and morale.

The big picture matters here, with the player controlling events much as a general would sitting in a comfortable bivvy a safe distance from sharp pieces of flying metal. Way to go!

peter_eley@nzherald.co.nz