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The Entente Review - PC

Watching the intro FMV one might think 'Boy this looks like Battlefield 1942!' when in fact, it's closer to 1902. World War 1, or as some might call it - The Great War was a big disaster, and a new revolution for the world. New defence and offence techniques were tested, and armour never before seen was invented for protection, and for conquering purposes. The Entente looks at what these battles were like, in a retrospective way. However after the intro FMV, the battle scene soon turns to a nice menu with some cheerful music, one might assume that this is the Generals view of the war, as they sat and drunk cups of tea whilst their men were out on the fields getting slaughtered.

Gameplay

The Entente is really a game of numbers. Whoever has the bigger army wins. Don't worry about building up your town, because the enemy is concentrating on building their army, and once they have numbers you can be in serious trouble. For anybody that has read anything on a real war, it's got nothing to do with how many buildings you have - it's the soul fact of who has the better weapons, and who can put the younger man in army clothes and give him a gun. This game has quite a lot of different buildings, and plenty of different units to build your army with which is great work by Buka Entertainment. The buildings all have superb architecture, and really fit in well with the whole 1910's/1920's feel.

Once entering singleplayer mode, you're faced with 3 different game types: Campaign, Mission and Random map. Campaign and Mission modes will keep you busy for many, many hours, and the Random Map option is always there for a nice quick play. In Campaign more, you can take one of 5 campaigns (ignoring the Tutorial): Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German and Russian. Once beginning the campaign, you can select different missions in which to take part in. Each campaign has about 10 missions to complete, meaning there are lots of missions to complete!

Luckily the game has a nice little feature that it calls an 'Economic Advisor'. This feature will build all your buildings, and create all your units for you if you turn it on when you decide to go off to battle. It's almost impossible to both battle and look after your city, as there is so much going on, on such a large scale. Battles get very jumbled, and can often end up looking like one big pile of ants. Along with the Economic Advisor is a Military Advisor. Basically, if you put both of these on, then you can put on your favourite episode of Southpark and then return to the same battle 20 minutes later.

Moving your units around is not a problem, as Buka have made it ... (continued next page)