I love this campaign! It's got everything: shooting, sneaking, and an authentic babe besides. Everything but blowing things up, and I don't really care about that.

It would be my favorite campaign in the game if only it were longer. At least one hair-raising adventure escaping through the countryside, with Agent Salter along...oh, well. Chances are they'd have screwed it up with something goofy at the end, the way they did the final campaign.

Anyway it's a lot of fun. The first mission isn't too hard and the second isn't really as hard as it looks. If you could get through the previous campaigns, you can get through this one. By now you've got the skills or you wouldn't have gotten this far.

Somewhere in the mountains of Austria. The two missions take place in entirely different settings, related only in narrative theory.

One absolute requirement: one of your men has to have the highest possible stealth rating. Broadhurst or Glesby, nobody else makes sense; and Broadhurst has other qualities that make him a better choice than Glesby.

Only one man needs the high stealth rating. The others need good shooting skills and endurance. Strength isn't a big deal; they don't have to carry all that much. Even first aid skills aren't terribly vital, because the game doesn't let you have any decent medical supplies.

Actually for this campaign I just use the same team I had in the first one: Broadhurst, Elliot, Lauer, and Mulholland. My rationale is that these guys are a special team, not really part of any official unit (certainly not the SAS), assigned to certain top secret missions in the European theater.

You only have to pick equipment for the first mission; the second is a lone wolf job and you'll be using only captured gear.

The first mission is best run with silenced weapons. They're only really needed in the last bit, but they have some value at other points; the less noise you make, the less attention you attract.

I'd prefer silenced Stens for everybody, but there are only two in the menu, so I give the other men De Lisle carbines. One man does need to have a regular sniper rifle - the Enfield - but he won't need much ammo; it's just for a couple of spots. In fact nobody will need a tremendous load of ammo; it's only for the one mission after all.

No grenades needed, and no explosives or heavy weapons. (There's an optional extra-points bit in the first mission that involves destroying a halftrack, and if you plan to try for that then I guess you should take a bazooka, but I never bother with it.)

The stealth man will have to have a knife, and should get the big first-aid kit.

This wouldn't have been an SAS job; we'd have to be talking SOE or OSS. Other than that it's not bad at all; nothing ridiculous anyway.

Of course the premise of the first mission is pretty thin: taking on all those Germans when it would be easy to swing around through the mountains and bypass them, and raiding an outpost just to get a truck and its paperwork seems a bit extreme - why not just ambush the truck on the road in some isolated spot? As for going to all that trouble to get an enemy uniform, British secret intelligence undoubtedly had enough of them on hand to outfit a Wehrmacht battalion.

And the "castle" seems to have an awfully small guard detachment, for a place that supposedly contains such important material; and once again, the big-deal secret documents are lying in plain sight rather than locked up. (You'd think they could have done something interesting with lock picking here.)

But these are quibbles. On the silliness scale, this is the least silly campaign in the game. Nothing in it to make you go, "Oh, horse shit!" which I can't say for any other HD2 campaign.