In many ways GA: PoP is just a friendly WWII war game in fetching fancy-dress. Whether you’re fighting your way through the tough, carefully crafted campaign (there are single scenarios and skirmishes too) that takes you across forest, steppe and magma wastelands, tactics tend to revolve around familiar ’40s factors like LOS, cover and morale. Dig in that infantry platoon in that mountain pass and they should hold up enemy armour long enough for your engineers to build a pontoon bridge across the river. Wait until nightfall to push those APCs across that plain and they’ll likely slip through undetected.

Why did the devs bother with a futuristic setting if they weren’t going to give us Death Orbs, Robo-locusts and Agro Gas? A dash of the outlandish would certainly have made it easier to overlook the few, probably patchable shortcomings.