The game promises much with the inclusion of new unit sets and a new campaign. However, in the final analysis fans will be left lamenting what could have been.

The campaign is based on the battles of Rommel (18 misions) and takes the player from his first battles, through the desert campaigns where he was at his peak and then through the later campaigns where disillusionment and ill health took their toll on his generalship. They represent a tour de force of the game's capability with small missions, small, mission-based scenarios and large, sweeping battles. What disappoints, however, is the glaring absence of any representation of the battle of El Alamein. Something so pivotal as the defeat that saw his power wane has been reduced to a side skirmish around an oasis. With the power inherent in the game engine it cries out for a mammoth set of scenarios based around the 12-day battle.

When playing the campaigns some of new features become apparent and also some of the problems. Unlike the previous game in the series, the aircraft have been significantly strengthened. It now takes a fair amount of AA fire to bring them down and consequently air power has taken on a bigger significance. Almost unbalances things. In our playtest we found that by using fighter bombers we could recon. a large amount of the map and readily target the opposing forces with a weight of artillery. As there appear to be no reinforcements coming in from off-map for the enemy, and what's on the map is all they get, it is relatively easy to break up most attacks prior to their commencment with both strafing and artillery.

Where in later battles the enemy has the predominance of air power, here the reverse applies. You play against an AI that effectively sees all of your movements and responds with a massive artillery barrage. This would be OK if you could offset this by beefing up your AA units. However, the unit selection is largely predetermined for each scenario. One of the appeals of the earlier game is the ability to develop your core units into a balanced army that suits your playing style and you can carry them from battle to battle.

Although you can do the same in this latest version, each battle is now set to automatically limit you in what you can field. You may have carefully nurtured a battery of veteran units to find that you are only using one gun in the scenario. It makes the whole process of developing a set of core units rather moot.

One of the big criticisms of the earlier game was the path finding and AI. Path finding was dicey with units often taking a circuitous route to your desired destination and it required a lot of hands-on attention to ensure they arrived safely at their destination. We had hoped this would have been fixed in this new version, however it seems to be worse. Often we had a virtual traffic snarl up with gun and limber units hopelessly entangled at a choke point or terrain feature. This requires a laborious task of identifying the key unit, that once moved, would untangle the rest. Some terrain features have also added to this nightmare. The new desert tile set includes a wider variety of sand types and on a lot of these you can not unlimber a gun. This is not detailed in the manual and is largely only found by trial and error.

The AI was also supposed to be improved and although this is evident in more aggressive air units, overall the improvement does not seem all that significant. Enemy attacks are largely predictable manner events tend to be scripted.

There are some single-player missions included in the game which gives players the opportunity to play with some of the new Italian and Japanese units. However, the lack of a campaign built around these is disappointing and an opportunity lost. Their inclusion, however, has increased some of the variety in the multiplayer aspects of the game and this where most fans will see the benefits of the expansion.