Wargaming.net's Massive Assault is as niche and niche games can get but does a great job of disguising what it really is - a good old fashioned war game delivered in a brightly colored turn-based, tactical wrapper. The wrapper is a pretty decent graphics engine that offers some moderately decent eye candy (it's not the best looking game you've seen this year, nor the worst), gameplay centered around turn-based tactical action and a few other wrinkles thrown into the mix to make gameplay easy to pick up but hard to master.

Massive Assault (or MA as some are fond of calling it) unfolds across six different planets in the future during a time when a ruthless military force called the Phantom League and the Free Nations (the good guys for all intents and purposes) have waged a bitter war for control. The Free Nations is a government with relatively good intentions, while the Phantom League is an evil empire, bent on ruling all of the known colonized planets with an iron fist. One of the key features of MA is Secret Allies, undisclosed nations that have chosen a side and will serve with whatever military might and monetary aid they can. The game is comprised of a map of varying sizes and terrain divided up into countries. Some countries have chosen allegiance to either Phantom or Free Nations, while some remain neutral. Until a country is disclosed, your enemy doesn't know which countries are willing to work with you. Likewise, the player doesn't know what countries have signed on to be secret allies until they are disclosed or invaded. Each country produces a certain amount of cash each turn that can be used to "recruit" or purchase units. Each country, depending on size (large, medium and small), start out with a certain amount of cash in the treasury and produce certain amounts of money per turn.

MA is truly tactical from the start - players may be forced to disclose an ally that is isolated or may have the advantage of having a countries side by side - it's all random in some game play types like World War. Players will also have to deal with terrain (mountains, water, passes, choke points, and elevations) that can cause some extra challenges or be used as an advantage. Toss air support, the proper use of unit transports and naval units, and Massive Assault becomes a cunning game of chess. Each move is important and sometimes even a well-placed unit headed down the path to destruction can buy players more time.

MA makes good use of tactics in a number of ways. A few examples include using units to invade a country and halting their ability to recruit units (called recruit blocking), placing units on borders to block movement - even if destroyed - during a turn, and using terrain like water and elevation to make engaging the enemy or being engaged if in the advantageous position. MA makes each and every move important: players can disclose Secret Allies or invade countries anytime they wish but doing so can cause a lot of problems depending on what lies inside that country's borders. There's no free lunch in this game, despite the fact that the game seems like a simple affair at first glance. Of course there's more to it than that, but that gives you a basic idea of what challenges you might face in the game.

Massive Assault offers a lot of challenges - from tutorial missions that train you on the basics, to campaign missions that put you face-to-face with intelligent AI that will test your mettle to the bitter end. After you've made your way through that, you can also try your hand at some large scale battles against the AI or take the battle online. Playing through all the missions is important training for anyone courageous enough to log on and find a human opponent to battle because the AI is pretty smart and uses every advantage to win. Using the right tactics will make quick work of novice players and give you the skills you need to take on experts.

If I had one complaint about the game, it would have to be the way that multiplayer is handled. Turns are turn based so players will spend a lot of time uploading and downloading turns on a regular basis. The game does offer an optional email alert that tells you when it's your turn, but if you're playing a lot of games it might be a little bit too much to handle. It's nice that the game offers turn-based gameplay in this way, but it would have been nice if players could simply be in a game at the same time and take turns like Incubation (if you're not familiar with it, it's a cool tactical strategy game that was developed by Blue Byte Software). Given the size of the maps, it would have also been nice to be able to play against more than one player - and hopefully the upcoming expansion planned for the game will offers something along those lines. Other than that small dig, MA is a pretty solid game and registering online with Wargaming.net allows players to continue the fun with plenty of challenges from players all over the world.

Overall Massive Assault is a solid war game, with interesting and enjoyable multiplayer and single player to keep the hardcore turn-based strategy addict coming back for more. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is simple to pick up (but hard to master) and finding an online opponent doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment. If you like turn-based strategy games then you can't go wrong with Wargaming.net's latest offering. Pick it up.