Ironstorm (PC)

By PETER ELEY

History, they say, is written by the winners. But what if the good guys (that's us) hadn't won World War?

That's the scenario in Ironstorm, one of the new breed of war games in the mould of Medal of Honour and Ghost Recon.

Ironstorm is an ultra-realistic game in its gameplay, but its plot deviates sharply from recorded history. The game begins in 1964, and the war, which began in 1914, is still raging.

A quick history lesson: during the real war, which ran from 1914-18, Russia underwent a communist revolution and effectively withdrew from the greater conflict between Britain and Germany.

Ironstorm is based on the premise that the revolution was captured by a certain Baron Nikolai Aleksandrovich Ugenberg who built a vast Russian-Mongol empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

This latter-day Genghis Khan has been fighting a broad Western-Occidental coalition for the past 50 years and is showing no signs of slowing down.

What this scenario does is to allow a background of World War I combat conditions, such as trenches, barbed wire and no-man's land to be overlaid with more modern war technologies.

You play James Anderson, a war orphan born in a bunker to parents he never knew. Sob. He might be a tough guy, but he takes his orders from Cecile Newcastle, the attractive captain of the Royal Highlands regiment, and doesn't she look good in a kilt?

It's an inventive plot from a French games development studio, which may explain the new slant on European history: they find it hard to accept that everyone kicked their butt this century.

The gameplay is standard for this genre, with missions ranging from stealth and sniper operations, infiltration of enemy bases, and full-on battles.

Graphics are high quality and would-be buyers should note that a Geforce2 graphics card is required.

* Take2 Interactive, R16