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"This is your opportunity", the game's authors assure us, "to halt the progress of the Communist war machine and thwart their plans for world domination".

As with many things about the Vietnam War, it wasn't quite like that. This is Nam as the Americans would have liked it to have been, six company-sized actions in which enemy forces appear unexpectedly, but stay to be shot at, in which the superior mobility and firepower of the American forces inevitably triumphs.

The game mechanism is an extremely simple one of picking up individual units with a cursor-joystick control while cycling through fire and movement phases.

But it's a pretty silly view of a war that was dominated by politics, by attitudes, by civilian programmes, by everything in fact but the firefights of which the game consists. It has its moments, but after an hour or so zapping the Cong in this manner you begin to realise why the Americans lost. A far better game could be designed about Vietnam from another viewpoint. I found this one easy to lose interest in.

The game's scenarios have not, however, been chosen to give the Americans an easy ride (the computer always takes the other side). On offer are a jungle ambush, an American prepared defence, an Air Cavalry assault, a tunnel operation, the one occasion in the war when American and North Vietnamese tanks fought each other, and the recapture of the Hue citadel. With both historical and non-historical options some of these come as genuine and complete surprises to the player. The terrain graphics are extremely good, although the troops look rather too much like pin-men.