These only play a supporting role however, so the bulk of the work is done by tanks and infantry; and effective use of these units can involve significant amounts of babysitting and micro-management. Infantry (and engineers in particular) are able to repair tanks, so it's useful to keep a unit or two close when going on the offensive. Units improve in ability as they see more combat, so this is another incentive to keep as many as possible fully operational. Actually doing this, though, is rather tiresome and repetitive, involving a great deal of pausing and unpausing of the action. Rather than, say, having an overall command that tells your engineers to automatically repair any nearby vehicles in trouble, it's necessary to click on each individual unit and give them repair orders.

Although impressive in scale and quite solid tactically, Officers suffers from somewhat poor presentation. The graphics are functional, but afflicted by a certain 'shimmer' that causes considerable distraction when rotating and zooming the camera. Voice acting is even worse, ranging from dispassionate expressions of 'They're shooting at us,' delivered with all the fear of a man purchasing a newspaper to hilariously over the top accents - such as the (possibly) Irish gentleman who exclaims 'OI REEEAD YOU LOOUUWWD AND CLEEUURR' whenever you request backup. There's a little music too, but as the main theme sounds ominously like it's being played slowly on a single-octave Casio keyboard it's perhaps best just to switch it off.

It's unfortunate for Officers that it comes out at a time where the deluge of WW2 games in various genres are a running joke, and at a point where nearly all games players (surely ... SURELY) have played a favourite Real Time Strategy title half to death. Then again, the developers did actively choose to set it in WW2 and knew they would be up against people potentially jaded by traditional RTS mechanics. Nothing about the game is particularly objectionable, but the design decisions have condemned it to a state where nothing really has the chance to stand out either. As a result, there's very little to suggest that anybody, baring WW2 RTS completists, should pick this up over their current RTS of choice.

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