The engineering corps is quite vital to your war effort, mind you, and the best aspects of Cold War’s strategising comes in defending these gooey-soft targets as they attempt to do their job in the heat of battle. This part actually works very nicely, as your mechanised war machine moves and positions to provide safe passage for the few foot soldiers who actually make an impact on gameplay.

Air strikes are pretty much just smart bombs – the kind you’d see in a classic shmup – though on occasion you’re rewarded with troops zip-lining from hovering choppers, or a flaming carpet of napalm first thing in the morning. But these are fleeting moments of action amidst a sea of rolling tanks, and with gameplay that’s as tragically linear as a snake eating a broom handle, this is unlikely to be enough to sate the hunger of today’s very well-fed RTS fans.

There are a lot of clever objectives, both primary and secondary, that begin to build a picture of how this concept of World War III would play out – and clearly there’s been a lot of dedicated effort into coming up with these ideas – but almost every one is achieved by an all out tank rampage. You can make it deliberately difficult for yourself, if you really feel the need to get your money’s worth, but after a couple of handicapped missions you’ll undoubtedly build up an unstoppable force and simply set it off rolling into the unintelligent enemy walls.

Switching hats for a moment, I feel it’s worth pointing out that arcade game fans might actually gleam more pleasure from Cold War than RTS players. The unintentional simplicity of the game and its massive reliance on pushing tanks into crumbling cities boots-first kind of makes for a complex, slow moving shoot-‘em-up. I know this isn’t the sales pitch Atari would ever choose to employ, but dispensing with much of the strategy, and concentrating on the real time aspect, Cold War offers an accidentally unique take on the shmup that, if I were a game designer, might plant the seed of a new concept in arcade vehicle shooters.

But we have to remember that Cold War is aimed at the RTS brigade, and in that respect it comes up a little... well, cold. Perhaps if you’re unavoidably smitten with the idea of rolling tanks through an alternate 1950s, or your completionist nature demands you continue your Panzers game collection, you won’t have to kid yourself too much to find the entertainment buried beneath the rubble of Cold War.

But if you’ve just come off a long stint on, say, Empire: Total War, or Men of War, then you’ll pan Cold War in no time and never look back.

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