Any wargaming aficionado worth his or her salt has played one of the three Combat Mission games. Beyond Overlord, Barbarossa to Berlin and Afrika Korps are some of the best tactical company / battalion-level wargames ever made, moving the genre away from the two-dimensional hex warfare of old into (albeit crude looking) full 3D, with detail levels up the wazoo.

If you want your wargame realistic enough to tell the difference between a PaK 40 75mm anti-tank gun hitting a Sherman's upper-left armour at an angle of 22 degrees from a range of 800 meters, versus say 45 degrees at 1,600 meters, then CM delivers. This extreme attention to detail, combined with a 3D battlefield and the innovative "WeGo" system of turn-based gameplay, has made CM the dynasty to beat in the wargaming genre.

Now the fourth instalment in the series is almost upon us, set for release at the end of July 2007, with a totally re-worked engine, a real-time combat mode, and the small matter of having jumped forward about 60 years in military technology and tactics from the Second World War to a fictional conflict involving Syria and the United States in 2007.