Massive Assault is futuristic turn-based strategy game that takes place several hundred years in the future. By the end of the 23rd century AD the Earth came to energy crisis, which lead to unstable political situation. Many countries were shaken by revolts resulting in dictatorships and totalitarian political regimes. The Earth is divided into two major rivalries: the Axis-of-Good, and the Shadow Clique. The Shadow Clique realized that it was not strong enough to win in an open military conflict on Earth, so it decided first to get control of the distant colonies, which served as energy sources for whoever controlled them...

Massive Assault could be descibed as a tactical, hex-based game but without the hexes. You deploy your forces in a hex-based pattern, but the actual maps don't have hexes, instead, they include the national borders of different countries, each of which is controlled by a capital city.You'll usually have around dozen of these territories in each mission, and some of them will start out as yours, a few other as the enemy's, but most of them are neutral. At the start of the game, you will have to disclose two of these to begin play. Each country you control is providing you certain amount of money every turn, so you can buy new units. However the countries have limited resources, which force you to seek for new territories to conquer all the time. The gameplay is focused almost solely on combat. There is no resource gathering/management, no city building, and no technology tree to climb. The game takes on a chesslike feel, as you advance your units and make calculations about how to sacrifice certain units in order to destroy more of your opponent's.

A typical turn looks like Guerrilla Phase (you deploy guerrilla), Movement (see above), Combat Phase (you moves your units and attack enemy units), Revenue Phase (buy/recruits the new troops), Disclosure Phase (you can declare one of your Secret Allies to officially enter the war). With more units on the map, there's noticeable load time whenever the computer has a turn. It's pretty boring to wait a couple of minutes on computer turn.

Massive Assault features 5 comprehensive tutorials (self explanatory and fairly useful), 24 surprisingly difficult scenarios that take place in small sections of the six worlds, World War (6 climatically different worlds), four Campaigns (based on the same worlds in the World War option), Hot Seat and Internet Play Modes. You can choose from 13 different deployable units for each side ranging from your basic cannon-fodder unit to Battleships, Carriers, Bombers, Mechanized Assault Robots and Tanks. Each unith has different rating - hit points, movement points per turn, damage potential, firing distance and cost.

Compared to other turn-based titles, Massive Assault does a surprisingly good job. Of course, it will take some time to get "in". If you like strategy games with challenging AI, you could check this one.

System requirements: Pentium III-700, 256MB RAM, 3D video card with 16MB RAM, TCP/IP connection for Internet play, Direct X 8.0