(May 4, 2004) — Combat Mission: Afrika Korps, (CMAK) the newest edition in the award-winning Combat Mission series, defines the cutting edge of realism and depth in the war-game genre. It is one of the first games that accomplishes what the first point of strategy games was: to simulate real battlefield command. In this game players benefit more from knowledge of actual military strategy than “game” tactics. The game-play of CMAK is fairly simple: the players have all the time they need to issue orders, without any action taking place, and once they are ready, they click ‘go’ and combat plays out for one minute in which they can do nothing. This mode of game-play is designed to mimic real warfare, where commanders in the field cannot, for example, immediately react to an ambush; it takes a little while to bring troops back from doing what they have decided to do. CMAK follows the progress of WWII across the Mediterranean theatre and each confrontation in the game is based on a real one in history. Great efforts were taken so that CMAK would be historically accurate and it clearly shows in the amount of depth and detail in the scenarios available for play. The developers put a huge amount of effort into making CMAK as real as possible and removing as much of the “game” aspect from it. For example, in many RTS games, a player can build up a huge force of one unit type, select them as a group, and command them to attack the enemy base, and they will usually fair quite well, while they would be utterly decimated in real life. This is where CMAK really shows how different it is from traditional RTSs such as Command and Conquer, Warcraft and the like. One of the first scenarios in the game has the player playing as the Germans assaulting a dug-in British infantry position. Selecting all the tanks and ordering them to blindly charge the enemy position, as is the first instinct of most strategy gamers, yields only chaos—the tanks cut off each other’s paths as they are ruthlessly gunned down by the enemy anti-tank guns and mortars. This is the way such a foolish order would probably play out in real life, without specific instructions and planning. Every minute detail of CMAK is specifically designed to be as realistic as possible. Units become tired if forced to walk over long distances or subjected to harsh weather conditions. Soldiers are affected by morale conditions as well. As of yet, CMAK is not widely distributed. It is currently only available from the developer’s website, www.battlefront.com , so many of the normal places one would shop for a game like amazon.com, do not carry it. Despite its relatively narrow distribution spread, CMAK has not failed to turn heads in gaming publications, becoming PC Gamer’s Turn Based Strategy Game of the Year for 2003 as well as earning glowing reviews from numerous other magazines and gaming sites.