In the last episode, post apocalyptic Earth was involved in a bitter struggle. Mutated surface-dwellers want to destroy the underground dwellers and vice versa. Te ultimate goal is a doomsday device circling the planet. Both sides are constructing rockets which can reach this device and unleash its awesome power on their enemy. Now read on...

You may imagine that this is just an excuse for mindless violence. Violence, yes - heatseeking missiles tearing through armour plating, expensive aircraft disrupting at a molecular level - but this is violence with a modicum of cunning.

Sure, you have vehicles and weapons, but not many. The key is to gather resources and factory capacity so that you can build more weapons. There are plenty of factories and mines scattered around, but most are occupied, so your first judgement must be how many units you can afford to spend capturing these mines.

You have a team of scientists to develop new weapons and refine existing ones. When you 'liberate' some territory, more scientists will become available.

These cunning scientists have invented a teleport device with which you can travel vast distances without using any fuel (many vehicles have a limited range). Teleport devices are quite robust and can be carried and left at your destination by a number of vehicles, including bomber aircraft.

A useful early mission then, is to load up your bomber and fly as far into enemy territory as you can. Just before you get taken out, drop the teleport. Then the tanks can move in.

The ultimate goal is to capture and refit a rocket launching site from which to recapture the satellite. To aid you in this, you have many types of vehicle - tanks, hovercraft, helicopters and airships - and piloting each is a game in itself.

All of them have different attributes and are piloted in different ways. The helicopter can take off and hover, tanks' turrets move independently of the direction they are travelling, airships are sluggish. However, the controls are more or less generic, so it's not like learning a new flight sim every time you step into a new vehicle. Echoes of that Mike Singleton classic Ashes here.

There are four skill levels including a training mode, which is especially useful, because the game can easily be over before you've worked out what's going on.

Perhaps I'm getting old, but to succeed at this game you have to swap between up to six vehicles, blasting, bombing and planning as you go, virtually incessantly - I can only take about 20 minutes without having to sit down with a Valium sandwich. Like the classic Carrier Command, it is demanding.

There are many ways you can play it, though, and each is very satisfying. The filled 3D animation is good, and as a sort of Ashes/Carrier Command/Millennium 2.2 mixture, it's a surprisingly decent game.

Hmm. I can see this game getting huge marks in other mags simply because it's big and looks good, and reviewers are prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. However, I've played it for four days now and still find it confusing, and no game should be that user-hostile.

I'll concede that it's big and that by only completing about a third of the 20 odd missions, I'm bound to have missed out on loads of exciting things that happen later on, but the simple truth's that I find it infuriating to play.

I hate designing something and the being told here aren't enough minerals to build it. I hate having to find the EACT point of an enemy base to park my tank so that it'll have been captured by my side. What's wrong with just getting armour into the general area ( you know, within a yard, say)? I'm annoyed by the constant air presence of the enemy. If they've got so may planes, why don't they just bomb me into oblivion? It looks good, it's vast, and I'm glad that I'll never have to play it again.

Picture the scene - it's the post-apocalypse year 2083 and an uneasy peace exists between the horribly mutated surface survivors and the clean skinned bunker-dwellers. As you can imagine, the mutants hate the underworlders because they haven't had their DNA ravaged by the nuclear holocaust of 1997, and the underworlders in their lead-lined bunkers hat 'them upstairs' because they're icky to look at, with hands growing out of their heads and teeth running along their forearms, or should that be four arms? Hoo-hoo, nothing like a good mutant gag. I always say.

The original Armour-Geddon (AP1, 87%) was based around the first conflict between these two, and you had to race against the clock to pick up the parts of a neutron bomb to use against the mutants, otherwise they'd unleash particle beam death from the Hellfire SDI satellite orbiting the planet. The sequel's set 70 years later, when it's just been discovered that the Hellfire satellite's still up there and just needs a battery charge and oil change. Once again (ta-da-da-da-daaaa!!!!) the race is on.

JUGGERS
But wouldn't you just know it? Your people have been on a constant war footing for seven decades, but they haven't got enough weapons or factories to launch a full scale attack. In all that time, they haven't got round to developing vehicles past the 'lightly armoured, poorly armed, gas guzzling' stage or worked out how to manufacture cannon shells that do more than plop pathetically into the strontium-laced sand 30 metres in front of your tank.

So you not only have to grab enemy factories, but also develop and build weapons against the clock. It's a crap premise, and the review clock starts ticking down from this point.

You start off with a base and a few feeble vehicles. The game's mission structure starts you off on a simple task and builds up to all-out combat and space rocket construction. Along the way, you capture enemy factories and mines, build more weapons and expand across the map. Mission one's simply to capture an unguarded enemy base, but even this highlights many of the strengths and nearly all the weaknesses of the game.

If you want a vehicle to have a chance of surviving on the surface, it needs to be well developed with powerful weaponry, so R&D is task one. You just choose an item (e.g. light tank, teleporter, mini-missiles) assign some scientists to the job and then wait until they get developed from stage one (low range, power draining, heavy) to stage three (light, fuel efficient, powerful) before going on to build it. It's easy to sue, and it's also completely boring.

Another task is to supply the production plant with raw materials from the mines. Looking at the tactical map, you can see the position of the main base/factory complex as a green blob, but it took me ages to realise that there's amine right next to it. Wouldn't it have been sensible to colour mines and bases different colours? I think so. To fix a supply route you drag the mouse from mine to base (a distance of some two pixels in this case), and they link with a pulsing line. Fascinating.

LAST OF THE V8S
You can then manufacture anything you've researched (providing you've got enough raw materials, of course) and launch up to six vehicles onto the battlefield at any one time. Each vehicle has equipment mounts onto which you can bolt weapons, night sights, cloaking devices or fuel tanks, and then you're ready for war...

...in an extremely pretty 3D polygon desert. If you're in a tank, you trundle across it, if it's a hovercraft you rise slightly as you start the engine and the cruise across it, and if you're in a plane, you can sail over it and frequently crash into it, so top marks for the 3D modellers.

What do you do in this terrific 3D landscape? Well, you drive around (obviously) and marvel as the colour fades from the scene and night falls. Then you either switch to your night sight and continue to drive through an eerie green darkness, or you curse your lack of image intensification and sit in the darkness getting bombed until dawn.

If you've got your missile systems select, then they automatically blast away at air threats, which leaves you free to zap ground targets with lasers, shells (which are a bit useless) or rockets. If you're in the air, you can strafe enemy amour with unguided rockets, or bomb them, although I found this terribly hard.

The combat's sort of souped-up Battlezone, but the added complication detracts from stalking your enemy rather than adds to the enjoyment. It's just so full of targets that I was left thoroughly confused. You're never sure which enemy to shoot at next, there's just so many of them out there.

Come to think of it, I was confused by the entire game, as it really doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to be. The R&D and mining elements make it seem very strategic, but you can't implement these strategies without battling your way across the surface in the 3D sections. The fact that you've got six vehicles to control's baffling as well mainly due to a particularly ineffective waypoint-based automatic pilot that's supposed to allow six craft to function simultaneously.

SOMA
The waypoints are hard to use because there's no clear map of the game area, only the horribly cramped tactical map I mentioned earlier, and a pretty rotating map showing enemy armour and planes. Pretty useless that is. Like I said at the beginning, expect other reviews to make it high because they think it'll be good once you get into it but ignore the fact that you probably won't want to. Trust us on this. We're professional.

What is it about Armour-Geddon 2 that I find so maddeningly addictive? On the one hand it's a kind of extended flight sim, using all the known MicroProse-style techniques to make you believe you're actually in the air (or rolling along the ground, should you be commanding one of the many ground craft available).

On the other, it's a sheer test of nerve and reflexes, as you attempt to juggle between controlling one craft and up to five others simultaneously. Not easy. And on the, ah, third hand, it's packed with strategy as you attempt to rid the world of the disgusting Hellfire.

It's the future, you see, and Hellfire is an intelligent defence satellite which once threatened to cloak the earth in a nuclear shroud. At the last moment just before it pressed the metaphorical 'red button', it malfunctioned and the Earth Defence Network (EDEN) breathed a collective sigh of relief. Now, though, it has begun its countdown to doom again, but this time EDEN, and you, are determined to be ready for the onslaught.

WHIRLYBIRD
The idea behind Armour-Geddon 2 is to build a rocket which can destroy Hellfire before it does more damage. At your disposal you have a number of air and land craft, some capable of fighting, some carrying cargo. Somehow you have to use all of your resources to mix together all the available components from all around the planet, and create this rocket which could just save Earth.

The Hellfire's cunning, though, and has control of a whole army of fighter planes and ground attack vehicles, hell bent on stopping your mission. However, if you can beat these enemies and gain control of their bases, you will capture extra resources (and technology) all of which will help you create a bigger and much more efficient rocket.

The vehicles at your disposal aren't difficult to control (except the helicopter, obviously), and I reckon it's possible to complete the game using each vehicle separately. It's definitely advisable, though, to multi-task and get used to controlling more than one at the same time.

Some of the journeys you're likely to make will be shorter than others - moving the larger components of your rocket, for example, will need a good long journey by land - and while that motors along the landscape it's useful to have at least one aircraft solely to defend it against enemy attack.

Longer journeys can be set via a series of coordinates on the main map screen. The craft will then begin moving, and make its way towards your marked destination. Although the vehicles carrying valuable cargo will be armour-plated, you can place guns and other weapons on them so that if they do happen to get stranded in the middle of the desert, at least they're not a sitting target waiting for the enemy to come along.

FITTING THEM OUT
Each of the vehicles can be equipped with a variety of weapons and support kit. In addition to the usual list of lasers, there's a range of missiles and nice technical add-ons like night-sights, cloaking devices and teleporters.

Of course, as with all the best games of this type, you're not just handed these weapons on a plate. In fact, most of them are unavailable at the start of the game; instead you have to plough money into the inventions screen, enabling your scientists to busily invent new equipment as you progress.

The enemy is not passive though. It has an intelligent strategy for closing in on your base, knocking you out and saving Hellfire. This is where your strength as a strategist and tactician is tested. For the whole game you need to finely balance your attention between defence and attack, in a way those familiar with Dune 2 will recognise. Except, of course, Armour Geddon 2 is played out in excellent first-person 3D.

Armour-Geddon 2 is one of the most difficult games I've ever played, but also one of the most enjoyable. I haven't been tempted to burn the midnight oil to finish it, because I think that's a long way away, but for me it's a game which is nice to dip into every now and again.

The balance between shoot 'em up action, strategic manoeuvres and the economics of inventions is superb, making it an all-round game that has something to satisfy everybody.