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Massive Assault is a futuristic turn-based tactical strategy game. Players are thrown into the command position of one of two warring factions, The Phantom League and The Free Nation Union. Six resource-rich planets have been discovered and both sides have set their sights on claiming them for their own. While not an extremely deep or involving storyline, it has the necessary component of any tactical strategy game- a reason to get destructive.

The game is played as a very complex form of chess. Each piece has its strengths and weaknesses and an exact duplicate on the opposing side. Each turn you may move and attack with every unit in your control. Through controlling territories, a player earns income to purchase a greater number of units to commence the battle. Each territory does have a very limited amount of income it can produce in any one scenario which brings a sense of urgency and immediate strategy to taking over territories.

For a turn-based strategy game, Massive Assault has some very good graphics. Each unit was created visually appealing and actually traverses the colorful terrain when ordered to move. Explosions genuinely send shrapnel flying in all directions, rockets arc toward their destinations, and lasers light the battlefield.

A young woman’s voice accompanies you in your battles. The voice, while meant to be exotic and soothing, immediately had me wondering more about her national origins than about where my units were placed on the battlefield. In her bizarre accent, she will taunt you during your losses, remind you if you forgot to move a unit, and even barely veil her desire to bed you when you succeed. Besides the peanut gallery the music is fairly standard for a war game. Being standard doesn’t make it any less horrible though. The rock-pop-techno beats pound a tempo in your brain that I found difficult to get out of my head when I attempted to sleep. What makes the music worse is the fact that it seems to be on a 15-30 second loop. Luckily the actual sound effects are fairly decent including laser fire, gunfire, rockets being launched, and the innumerable explosions.

Gameplay options are amazingly diverse. The tutorial mode is fairly simple and eases the player into learning the various controls for ordering your units around. Single mission mode is a step above and provides a small amount of tactical difficulty at first and leads on to very difficult scenarios. Campaign mode provides the basic storyline and is comprised of a series of scenarios which need to be completed in order to advance. All scenarios are variations on the conquer or defend scheme. World War mode plops you down on one of six worlds with only two objectives; liberate all countries and destroy all opposition.

I did have a little bit of trouble getting the game to work well with my computer's older graphics card though. While the problem was fixed very quickly with help from the knowledgeable support staff, I still feel it would be worth mentioning that some older graphics cards could fail to play the game correctly without help from support. I had to download the latest drivers for the card, change the display options, and configure the settings.ini file for the game before getting it to work properly.

Turn-based tactical strategy is a difficult sell to those who are not fans of the genre. While Massive Assault probably won’t change the mind of someone who is definitely not a fan of the genre, those that are teetering on the edge may just be won over by the easy initial learning curve. True fans of the genre may very well find themselves challenged towards the end of the game. Overall I felt Massive Assault was a great addition to a wonderful genre that has received fewer and fewer impressive entrants of late.