Overall:

Published by Kemco
Developed by SystemSoft

In the world of console gaming, there are genres that have just never been that well-represented. Perhaps chief among these conspicuously absent categories is turn-based strategy wargaming. In days gone by, I was a sucker for these sorts of games, from the earliest instance of Harpoon to SSI's fantastic "General" series (of which I think I played every single installment). And other than a port of Panzer General, the field for console strategy games has remained fallow. At least in the U.S.

Now, one of the most venerable strategy franchises in Japan makes its debut on a current-gen console. Dai Senryaku VII ("Great Strategy," as near as I can figure) puts you in control of a wide array of contemporary military hardware in a series of scenarios designed to test one's generalship. In previous installments in the franchise, the focus was squarely on WWII, and involved serious historical re-enactment in the scenarios. This version, however, divorces the strategy from geopolitics by casting the two sides simply as the Red and Blue armies. I see why the makers might want to take this approach, as it allows them to fictionalize modern military conflict, rather than deal with uncomfortable politics. It also means that the game is free to assign your available units from any of the eight countries whose hardware is represented in the game. This provides for a ton of variety in the available forces at your disposal, though getting familiar with all the different units' capabilities steepens the learning curve a bit, as there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 different unit types, covering land, sea, and air.

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