Strategy is one of the genres Nintendo DS is most suited for (at least when it's in the turn based variety), but so far, only Advanced Wars DS and Age of Empires: Age of Kings have stood out. With Fire Emblem DS still a couple of months away, Warhammer 40.000 Squad Command from THQ tries to fill the gap. And it does, although it's not perfect.

If you've played tactical Squad games like Jagged Alliance 2 or Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate, the basic gameplay in battle is quite similar, although not as complex. Alas, there's not much to do between battles, the whole strategic/organizational level of those two games (especially Jagged Alliance) is a no-show. But the battle mechanic is very nicely done: In each of the 15 single player levels, you have six units. In the beginning, these are six Space Marine scouts (the "young" soldiers who still have to prove themselves, and are not very well armored, but fast) with basic weaponty. With each mission, you will get one or two additional weapons, or a new unit type: Some of your scouts may be exchanged for "real" Space Marines, some Space Marines for Terminators. Or an infantrist might be substituted by a vehicle or "Mech" (actually a mortally wounded veteran who serves on in a walking, heavily-armoured steel coffin).

Every unit has a standard weapon with infinite ammunition, and a secondary weapon (which is really the better one) with limited ammo. This may be a shotgun or flame thrower, which inflicts damage to a wide angle of the immediate surroundings, plasma guns that deal a big punsh to either buildings, infantrists or vehicles, or long range weapons like lasers or sniper rifles. While vehicles didn't work too well (to put it delicately) in Chaos Gate, they work very well here; you'll get to use Predators, Land Speeders and even the mighty Land Raider (but you can't put troops inside them, they are just a bigger infantrist, in gameplay terms).

The battlefields are very suited for vehicles for two reasons. First, their basic layout is always "wide avenues with ruins", so there's plenty of room to manoeuvre. Second, most of the structures on the map are destructible, which is fun and which allows for strategys of "clearing the ways" for the vehciles or "taking cover" for the infantrists. Also, if you destroy a building where enemies tried to take cover in (or behind), they normally will get extra damage.

The red, overlapping fire arcs show where the opponents can shoot at. Stay out of as many of them as possible!

As usual with turn based games, you'll spend action points for moving your troops and letting them fire. Also as usual, spending more points on each shot will increase its accuracy. Although the DS is strongly limited by its screen size in terms of the overview it can give you over the battlefield, Squad Command does a very good job in this area. One of the two screens always shows the radar view of the whole map (including detected enemies and your units' view radius into the fog of war), which helps. And the interface is very clear about where you can move, if you then still could shoot (movement arrows get red once your unit would be over the minimum costs for a standard shot). Also, whenever you target a unit or building, a line is drawn between your soldier and the target. If this line is black, there's at least one obstacle between, so you can scroll back towards the soldier to eventually see where the problem is (a big red point on the line will mark the exact spot where the shot will be blocked). Still, it's possible your shot will get through the obstacle, destroying it. If there's no obstacle, the color of the line shows the hit probability, from red (very bad) to green (piece of cake). This system works extremely well, in fact it's far better than what Chaos Gate did on the big PC screen. Still, there's one drawback: The game doesn't scroll to or zoom in on the action when the AI is taking its turn, so you will hear shooting or moving and will frantically try to scroll to the right location in order to see what's going on or who's killing your last Terminator.

As is a must for a Warhammer tactical game (remember the board game Space Hulk?), your units and also the opponents will use "overwatch fire" (or fire of oppurtunity): Whatever action points they have left at the end of their turn will be used for one automatic shot at the first oppponent that enters their "overwatch field". This is shown as a green (or, for enemies, red) field which is limited by distance and field of view. So you need to lead your soldiers around enemies' overwatch arcs if you do not want to get that extra shot fired at you before you have a chance to fire yourself. Overwatch range is much more limited than active shots' range, so it's not to rewarding for campers.

Speaking of campers, there are also 9 multiplayer maps (local and "global", and you can beam the multiplayer game files to an face-to-face opponent who doesn't need to own his own copy of the game). You can have one on one battles between Space Marines and Chaos troops, Space Marines against Space Marines or Chaos versus Chaos. As always, a good Human player will be a much worthier opponent than the single player AI, but it does a good job. AI soldiers will retreat, will mercilessly kill off a weakened Space Marine (although they sometimes will let a very weakened soldier live which no Human opponent would ever do) and if you're not careful, a clear victory might turn into defeat within one or two turns where you were too bold or overlooking).

For game graphics which are not very detailed (you never get close to your units, but will always use an isometric bird's eye view), destroying buldings and killing opponents is surprisingly rewarding, the cultists and Chaos marines do a lot of shouting and screaming, and the (tiny) animations actually are quite good.. The 15 Missions mostly are about killing all opponents, but sometimes you'll also need to destroy certain structures, reach a certain point or defend against a vast force for a certain amount of turns. By the way, 10 turns is usually the maximum a battle takes, sometimes the fight will be won after 5 or 6 rounds. You'll win if only one of your six units is still alive.

This takes us to one of the two major contras: troop management is extremely limited. For each mission, your force is hard-coded, so it doesn't matter (except for the score) how fast or with how many casualties you've got through the last battle. You can't give names to your nameless soldiers, and you can't exchange the troop type. The only thing you can change is the secondary weapon (there are up to four for each infantry type or vehicle) and the amount of ammunition for that secondary weapon (more ammo equals less action points). That's it, sadly.

We were even more disappointed by the near total lack of story or background in the game. Hello, THQ? That is the main strength of Warhammer 40K, to have that extensive universe with all the Chapter stuff, Imperial intrigues, Chaos worlds, et cetera. But there is no main story line, you are a nameless hero, even your opponent or the worlds you fight on remain anonymous. You'll get only placeholder blabla like "Another world was corrupted, but we did not fear" (we made that up, but that's exactly what you will get in terms of information about your next battle). And you know that you are of the Ultramarine Chaper, but nothing is told about that chapter, nothing tabletop fans know of their special traditions or weaknesses is even hinted at. Sometimes, there will be mentioning of a Cathedral you need to reach and infiltrate (but never will that Cathedral have a name, or the city it is in, or the world that city is on). Apart from that, you'll see a couple of animated painted screens which go for cut scenes, that's it.

This major lack of background and story turns the game into a series of not connected, meaningless encounters, which have to shine in themselves to keep you playing. That they actually manage to do that (you'll want to see the end of the last mission!) only emphasises what major chance THQ has failed to take: Warhammer 40000: Squad Command for DS is a good game -- but it could have been an outstanding one.