Hey what a surprise, another abysmal day in soggy England, I think I’ll curl up with my PSP and blow crap up. Nothing better. In the hot seat this time around is Field Commander, a turn-based strategy game set in and around the modern day, but more importantly has the ability to sate my need for wanton carnage. Well, mediated wanton carnage at any rate. It’s a start.

You start Field Commander as a new recruit to ATLAS (Advanced Tactical Legion for Allied Security) although you were a higher rank in a previous life, everyone can’t wait to call you ‘Rookie’ again. ATLAS are a world alliance of military technology and expertise, and currently stand against the Shadow Nation, a crime empire that can’t wait to give you loads of cliché evil-doer scenarios for you to thwart.

The game’s often compared to Nintendo’s Advance Wars game, although not as good as that title, it certainly holds its own. The main aim of any mission is to either take over your enemies HQ or kill all his units. You’ll achieve this by taking over buildings yourself, by standing troops over one and giving the order to capture, or creating enough units to siege his base and take him out.

The way you get more money in the game is upon the completion of each round. You’ll get more money, the more buildings you have acquired, and thus the more money to spend on purchasing units.

Unlike some other recent strategy games I’ve been playing, in Field Commander you get land, sea and air units which really adds to it’s diversity, if not the confusion to begin with. You’ll have to keep your wits about you when it comes to clashing unit against unit as they all have strengths and weaknesses and hoping to stampede the enemy with the same unit can get them all killed by a couple of defences, and likewise sending in the wrong variety of units will just be a huge waste of time and resources.

Each unit can move a certain distance, which is no real change for a turn-based game, and invariably they can all move different distances. Additionally, if you’re familiar with any of the Sid Meier’s titles you’ll have already dealt with the frustration of having helicopter fuel to worry about. But this is what we want is it not? We want a personal involvement with our title and so yes, you’re going to have to break a few choppers to make a war.

My only gripes with the game are one of the problems with the genre generally, which is that it can all feel a bit slow. This isn’t something that’s down to the turn based element, but more a lack of ‘other options’. By this I mean that because you’re not building up bases and forming diplomatic relationships, you’re just building units and sending them at the enemy. This, regardless of the scenarios you’re put in can get a little tedious.

Hooking up with a mate to play a few rounds worked out better as we got to swig our pints while waiting for the next move. Again this is something that might differ from another title in that there’s nothing to do while you wait in game, which generally happens due to a lack of options or stats as said previously. The multiplayer options are Infrastructure, Ad-Hoc, Hot Swap and Transmission mode, which is somewhat similar to when you could “Play by email” in that you do your move and then send it to the server for your opponent to receive and move accordingly.

While the game might not make any leaps and bounds ahead of it’s rivals, it’s still got a lot of maps, units and game modes to keep you busy for a while.