VIVE LA RESISTANCE!

Be the deadly dagger in Nazi-occupied France in CLASSIFIED: FRANCE '44 

- Robert Zak

For me, the best battles in turn-based tactics games are the ones where the momentum can shift on one perfectly executed turn; those pivotal moments when you harness the abilities that you maybe forgot even existed when things were going smoothly, but suddenly justify their existence in one audacious sequence of manoeuvres that imbue the orderly grid-based combat with the cinematic splendour of backs-to-the-wall movies.

Here’s a case in point in Absolutely Games’ World War II XCOM-like Classified: France ’44. My merry band of spec-ops resistance fighter archetypes – the French woman with a beret, the bourbonloving American, the ‘chin up, cheerio’ Brit, you get the picture – have just planted several demolition charges on a German U-boat, and are now pinned down by the Gestapo reinforcements arriving on the scene. One of our own is down, while another two have had their morale shattered under a fusillade of gunfire, and are due to miss their turns trembling helplessly in the ‘broken’ state.