Battle
of the Generals by DenthorQ,
Price: $9.95
Reviewed May 2003
If you’ve ever played military board
game Stratego, you will know how addictive the game is. Battle
of the Generals takes the Stratego game concept and gives
it a modern look by using modern military hardware and army
ranking soldiers as board pieces in this chess-like military
game for the Pocket PC. Developed by DenthorQ, Battle of
the Generals draws inspiration from The Art of War and puts
you in a commanding outfit where you have control of air,
sea and ground units and you must defend your flag. The game
board might look simple, but the strategies you need to beat
the toughest computer opponents are nothing but complex.
On an 8x8 grid board, both you and your
opponent are given 24 pieces of symbols that represent an
army of soldiers ranking from Private to General and arms
including bomber, battleship, tank, nuke and more. Your goal
is to capture enemy’s flag while protecting your own.
There are three difficulty levels, and you can see what your
opponent’s pieces are only in training mode. In the
Expert and Blitzkrieg modes, you only see blank pieces representing
your enemy and the true identities are hidden from you. As
you move through the battlefield, you must carefully probe
the enemy pieces and intelligently guess their identities
and make your move. As you go through the training level,
you can develop strategies on how to set up your board and
to attack enemy pieces.
The game board design and help function
are the biggest winners in the visuals of Battle of the Generals.
The icons representing army ranks and armory make perfect
sense and there are three board styles including Jungle,
Wood and Marble. You will find the game window very well
designed and easy to understand. There is an info line with
date, time and battery status displayed while you are in
the game. You can use the shortcut buttons to bring up the
help screen, turn the sound on or off and exit the game.
If you turn on the help screen, you will get info on which
unit the selected piece can defeat.
The sound effects work perfectly
with the game design. A good collection of sound FX combined
with military marching music adds much more atmosphere
to the game play. Battle of the Generals runs on Pocket
PCs with ARM and Xscale processors.
Playing Hint and Tips
Explore different strategies on setting
up the board and testing out enemy pieces. Keep a tally of
the pieces lost on both sides. Use the help screen to understand
which pieces kill which ranks or hardware. Go through the
training level a few times to get a feel for the AI. |
