Warhammer is a tabletop fantasy game, where you paint little men and throw dice, it has quite a following. Warhammer 40,000: Squad command doesn’t involve the painting and dice throwing, but rather fittingly you do move little men around a battlefield to kill other men.
Many will be keen to know of just how good of a job developer, Red Lynx have done at crafting a strategy game specifically for handheld formats. Well we’re glad to say that Squad Command is simple enough so as to not make the controls too complex, which is a good start.
Before any of the fifteen missions begin, you’re able to kit your six soldiers or vehicles out with weapons (most of which are unlocked as you make progress through the game) but a bit of a downer is the fact that you don’t get to choose what soldiers or vehicles to take on a mission, and are stuck with the preset ones instead. But we suppose taking a mighty tank on every mission is going to upset the balance of the game somewhat, so perhaps such misgivings are unreasonable.
Out on the battlefield, the idea is to manoeuvre your units tactically around the environment, getting into advantageous positions and then proceeding to kill opponents. Every action, be it movement or attacking, is governed by action points, so care must be taken of how efficiently you make use of these vital points.
One of the great strengths of Squad Command is that much of the battlefield is destructible, allowing for you to potentially chip away at enemy cover with machine gun fire until it completely erodes or just outright destroy it with a missile, both of which obviously leaves any cowering enemies open to your mighty artillery.
As we said earlier, because of the overall simplicity of the game, the controls are a success and most commands require no more than one measly button press to execute, few require any more and not one ties your fingers in knots, so that’s half the battle won then.
Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command is an enjoyable slice of handheld strategy, that does few things wrong, though many PC gamers will find that it lacks depth compared to the strategy games they play on their mighty rig, but do be reasonable, this is a portable game and a well crafted one at that.
8/10
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