Now this is more like it. At least this campaign is set in an authentic SAS theater of operations - the only campaign in the game, unfortunately, that qualifies on that point.

Three of the six missions are very good; another one, while ridiculously easy and kind of silly, is lots of cheap laughs. Of the other two, one is a stupid pain in the ass but not all that hard, and doesn't last long; and the other is so bad in so many ways it makes me want to kick somebody, but it comes at the end. That doesn't add up to such a bad average. On the whole, then, a pretty good campaign. You can have a lot of fun with it.

North African desert, November 1942. The point of the mission is to capture a German officer named Schumann, who moonlights as a classical composer. The pursuit, however, involves a series of pretty intense actions against German and Italian forces.

I prefer to use a different set of men from those on the Norwegian mission. It is just not plausible that the same men would be shipped out to North Africa and then brought back to Europe and so on; and besides, as noted, that Norwegian business couldn't have been an SAS job, whereas this campaign is classic SAS.

Anyway, you probably want to try some different blokes, just for variety - but of course it's up to you. Certainly a team that worked well on the Norwegian operation would be excellent for this one.

Shooting skills are very important, but endurance is a big item too; everybody gets hit in this one. (Good first aid skills sometimes can partly compensate for lower endurance.) Strength isn't so vital; you don't have to carry any heavy objects, except for a single explosive charge for the first mission, and you're going to be resupplying weapons and ammo frequently.

At least one man must have a decent stealth rating, and this is desirable for the others as well.

I used to go with Hendry, Mallory, Carlyle, and Czakowski. Eventually I gave up on Malory, who is just too stupid and slow even though he's almost indestructible, and put in Glesby instead, moving him to the Number One slot, and he proved a far better choice. Hendry and Carlyle are excellent (Hendry's marksmanship with a rifle is phenomenal), and Czakowski is a fine sniper though not the world's best at a close-in mixup. Probably there are other choices that would work just as well as these or better.

One sniper rifle; more would be better, but you'll have a chance to pick them up. To start out with you can make do with iron-sighted Mauser and Lee-Enfield products, but give each man some kind of rifle. One MP-40 and two Thompsons. Take lots of ammo for the damn Springfield, and a reasonable supply for the Thompsons though there's no need to load up heavily as you're going to be switching over to MP-40s for everybody eventually. Give the MP-40 to your man with the highest stealth rating.

(Thompsons are more historically credible than Stens - the Sten was in widespread use by the winter of '42, but the SAS always preferred the Thompson, especially in North Africa - and that's what I use. But the Sten is lighter and therefore lets you carry more other stuff, and has a bigger clip so you don't have to reload as often. Your call; I don't know how important historic authenticity is to you.)

You absolutely have to have one explosive charge - the limpet kind, not the sticks of dynamite - but take two, for reasons that will be explained. At least one knife. Several grenades, though no need to stock up. Big first aid kits for three men, and several small ones for the other poor bastard; you're going to need a shitload of Band-Aids for this one.

Actually this campaign isn't bad, from a historic angle. The SAS did operate in North Africa - in fact that was its birthplace - and it did make extensive use of the American Jeep, and it did go in for attacking enemy airfields and making long treks across the desert, sometimes using captured vehicles.

The movie nonsense about capturing the Luftwaffe general is of course a load of ballocks, but not quite as outrageous as most of the mission premises; at least the Commandos did at one point stage a raid with the aim of trying to capture Erwin Rommel.

The realism does break down badly in a few points. The biggest being that of time: the airport raid in the first mission would have been staged at night, not in broad daylight. (I still don't see why they didn't design the mission that way; it would have made a really cool night mission.) The trip across the desert in the second mission would have been a night operation too, probably; the SAS whenever possible holed up under camo in the daytime and did their moving around at night, to avoid air observation. At the same time the German attack on the "oasis" should have been set in the daytime; the Germans never were big on night operations if they could help it.

The second mission is just basically silly as hell, for reasons that will be explained when we come to it. The fifth mission, while at least theoretically possible, contains one major absurdity: the Germans would never have stationed even a single Tiger tank at an airfield in 1942, let alone three - they simply didn't have that many Tigers to spare at the time. (Hermann Goring pressured Hitler into letting him have some Tigers for the Luftwaffe, but they didn't make their appearance until the invasion of Italy.) And the last one - well, it's just silly, but then it's so short it doesn't make much difference.

The Italians are using German weapons, which is a real disappointment; it would have been a real pleasure to use a Beretta submachine gun, or a scoped Carcano rifle. (An excellent sniper weapon, as the late L.H. Oswald demonstrated.) This can be excused on the grounds of simplicity; the designers would have had to create and incorporate a whole new set of weapons just for one campaign. Though that didn't stop them from doing all that ridiculous Soviet crap at the end of the final campaign, and Italian weapons would have been far more appropriate and we'd have gotten more use out of them; oh well....

The German weapons are correct for the period, with one major exception: the Panzerfaust wasn't used in North Africa - the first production run wasn't even delivered until August of 1943 - and the one in the game isn't even an earlier model.

The bazooka had been introduced in the US military by late 1942 and some of them may well have been issued for the invasion of North Africa; and it is conceivable that the Germans might have captured a few - but that a stock of them would be lying around a German-held mud-wall village in the middle of the desert in November of 1942 is just about as likely as the involvement of a squad of lizard creatures from Uranus.

(You can ignore the Panzerfausts - in the first mission, an explosive charge works just as well and is just as easy to use, and after that you don't need them at all - but in the fourth mission the bazooka is pretty much indispensible. You could get by without it if you're willing to drag a bunch of explosive charges around, and otherwise make things even more difficult and dangerous; it's up to you.)

The Jeep is fun to drive, and the big machine gun is a gas to use, but in 1942 SAS Jeeps mounted British Vickers machine guns rather than the American .50. But this is a quibble.

The aircraft are generally correct for the time and place, and very well rendered graphically; a far cry from the ludicrous aircraft of the old Hidden & Dangerous. The interior of the Ju-88's cockpit is particularly well done. The armament is incorrect - not always a bad thing, considering how they're used in certain missions - and the flying and aerial gunnery in the final mission are pure arcade.