Producer: M.C. Lothlorien
Retail Price: £5.95
Author: K. Hunt

This adventure wargame set in the latter days of World War II has you searching a vast complex beneath an enemy compound where a new and highly secret weapon is nearing completion. Intelligence reports suggest the weapon carries a bacteriological virus and it may well prove necessary to destroy it - lets hope it's a 99% household germ.

Early on you set a time limit for one of the objectives (there's a whole string of them) - say 60 hours - which becomes the rendezvous time for your pickup transport plane. The time elapsed since the start of the mission is constantly displayed in hours and minutes. Different actions and skills consume differing amounts of time; moving through the forest is more arduous than moving through the complex. The instructions suggest you create excitement by giving yourself a more limited time than the maximum allowed.

There are 30 skills to choose from including for example Biologist, Electronics, Explosives, Midget and Acrobat. The Leader is assumed proficient in all skills but the strain of the mission limits their use. All other characters have just two skills with their main skill used to describe the character, e.g., Chemist. At any one time in the mission you only have the use of three skills so choosing the four members of your team and when to make use of each skill is important to the success of the mission. To help you make a wise selection of team members you have time for eight interviews which reveal secondary skills, e.g., the Physicist might also be a Doctor, after which process you must select your team and set off. Your final choice is between the seven different objectives of varying difficulty.

Once you've finally finished selecting time, team and objective you then have a curious one minute wait while the computer frantically assembles a game good enough to justify all the hard work you've done.

Much of the play is centred around the three main scenarios of forest, compound and complex.

You are parachuted into the centre of the forest close to the target area and your position is denoted with a flashing square. A key to the forest features can be summoned up onto the bottom of the screen while you try to distinguish between the similar looking blobs in squares. To move you might type in ms to move south and it wouldn't be long before you found yourself up against an enemy patrol.

During combat your men are shown at the bottom of the skirmish zone map as numbers 1 (the Leader) to 5 and the enemy are represented by varying numbers at the top. Each of your men selects a target and can then move two squares to either get into a better firing position or take cover. In order to hit a target there must be a dear line of sight unobstructed by trees or men. You can actually see your projectile pass across the screen but its path appears erratic due to character block movement - this looks primitive in these days of sprite graphics.

You possess an aerial photograph of the compound but your position on the map only shows as much as you can see on the ground. The entrance to the underground complex lies in the centre of the compound and is heavily guarded. The photograph you have obtained only succeeds in convincing you of the foolishness of the mission.

Special Operations is a dauntingly complex wargame with simple character block graphics. The instructions do little to make the game any easier to play and so it takes quite some time before you can achieve any degree of success.

Difficulty: Difficult to complete
Graphics: Yes
Presentation: Good
Input Facility: Very limited
Response: Good
Special Features: This is an unusual adventure/wargame

Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95

There is a game called Squad Leader, a board wargame where players fight out small platoon-level World War Two operations with cardboard counters and a set of very complex rules.

While Special Operations is obviously not based on Squad Leader, the Lothlorien game has a similar setting and clearly belongs to the tradition of board games requiring strategic thought.

In Special Operations you must choose a small team of commandos to complete one of seven missions centred on a top secret enemy compound.

You may be required to photograph the compound from a distance or to mount a full-scale operation to sabotage whatever evil weapon is being produced there.

The members of your team will have two special skills - one you know immediately and the other you can find by interviewing likely candidates before the mission begins, although there is not sufficient time to interview everybody.

Which characters you choose is a vital part of the game, as you will need to select those skills which best suit the mission you have chosen.

Because of the variety of personnel from which to choose, Special Operations has a role-playing flavour about it. The test of a good role-playing game is how far it enables you to succeed by entering into character rather than thinking all the time about the rules. Special Operations seems to achieve that within the confines of a computer-moderated game.

The scenarios begin by having you parachuted into a heavily-wooded area near the enemy compound. You will move round the grid-like map avoiding or fighting the German patrols until you reach your objective. The maps may be inaccurate. All you can be sure of is what you can see immediately you.

The program has a separate combat routine. A map is drawn on the screen showing your position and you choose targets for your men and manoeuvre them about the terrain using the available cover to protect them.

All kinds of tactics are possible at that stage. You can try outflanking the enemy or pinning them down with covering fire while sending your men into the open to attack.

Special Operations is not a fast-moving, all-action game. It requires imagination and careful planning to play well but for those who enjoy a more thoughtful game the experience is rewarding.

The seven scenarios are slightly different each time you play, as is the range of characters available. Alternatively, you can use the Save Game option to keep the same team and set-up for a sustained campaign working through all seven scenarios in order.

Lothlorien has produced a welcome addition to the range of strategy war-games available and deserves praise for its success in creating the proper atmosphere of stealth and desperation.

MAKER: Lothlorien
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.95

Another of those Lothlorien strategy things where poor graphics (matchstick men, wobbly bullets, squiggly forests etc) and sluggish responses make play a bore. You handpick a commando team according to individual skills and then set about one of seven increasingly difficult objectives - from locating the enemy compound, through getting stuff out of it, to destroying it altogether.

Play takes place on two screens: one a map of the area, the other for individual locations and combat. Apart from moving, you have only about a dozen options. Frankly, since I discovered Lords Of Midnight, strategy games like this just seem pathetic. But then I never liked them very much anyway.

SOME THING SPECIAL

MICRO: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £5.95
FORMAT: Cassette
SUPPLIER: MC Lothlorien, 56A Park Lane, Poynton, Cheshire

Is this a wargame or is it an adventure I ask myself. And quick as a flash the answer comes back: "Yes it is!"

I cannot classify Special Operations. It has many of the elements of a quest-type adventure but is set in World War II, involves a fair number of squad level tactical decisions and includes a small graphic combat game for those tricky encounters with enemy patrols.

It is really an adventure because the essence of the game is discovering one or several items. In the first scenario you must find the secret compound and report to base, having been parachuted into an enemy forest. In later scenarios you must find your way into the compound or the even more secret complex, take photographs or find secret plans or commit acts of sabotage. You have to wander through the forest exploring caves and pits, sometimes finding useful treasures like books of cyphers, sometimes falling foul of a German patrol.

This game is really too full to give a fair description. It uses an excellent input system, once you get used to it, requiring two-letter combinations to carry out instructions but no pressing of the key. So it is almost as friendly as single key input but allows 26 * 26 possible commands. The screen is split into three - a constant left-hand display of the forest, a constant three-line space at the bottom for commands and messages, and a right-hand graphic area for showing various tactical displays, such as the cave maps for exploring and the combat maps for dallying with enemy patrols. However, when you find the compound a full screen map of this is given, so you can see that graphically it is well thought out and interesting.

The special operations group that you command consists of five people chosen for their skills (with a range of 30 possible skills ranging from acrobat to linguist to pilot). Only by experience do you learn which combinations of skills work best in which scenario and one of the difficulties of playing the game is the fact that the most important people seem to be killed first. So the combat section is not an irrelevant decoration but an important aspect of the game.

In fact the whole game plays very much like a commando raid on a foreign territory and I heartily recommend it. One small piece of advice - don't order your sniper to use his skill when there is nothing to shoot at; you won't be pleased by the results.