For many people, there's something appealing about any game that lets you lead a team of soldiers in a postapocalyptic war zone. So it's odd that this setting hasn't been used more often in computer games. Soldiers of Anarchy features a setting that's similar to the one used in MicroForte's Fallout Tactics, though its gameplay is more reminiscent of that of Red Storm's 1999 strategy game Shadow Company. Both of those games let you control multiple characters in real time in a mission-based format, and now German developer Silver Style has taken this genre into a fully 3D world in which a few humans hid in bunkers while the apocalypse took place and then crept out later to jump into a tank and shoot at things. And the game gives you better weapons along the way so you can shoot bigger stuff, which is also good.

If they have you outgunned, you can outsmart them.

Soldiers of Anarchy does a nice job of creating a world that's appropriate for its setting. It has a desolate landscape that effectively conveys a sense of wide-open space, and this is complemented well by the weather effects and lighting. The graphics are generally outstanding, and some of the vehicle models are really great. Additionally, the animations are beautiful. The game has smooth and realistic movements that range from general combat actions to getting in and out of vehicles and climbing over walls. Unfortunately, the character models are pretty homogenous, which makes it difficult to tell them apart, especially since the game's generic voice-over doesn't help. For instance, most of your characters are supposed to be Russians, but all the voice work was provided by Americans, so you'll tend to forget. These incongruities make Soldiers of Anarchy a technically inconsistent game.

Each mission involves multiple goals, only some of which are revealed at the beginning. Scavenging for weapons is important, as you need to collect ammunition and you can trade extra weapons for more powerful ones. Soldiers of Anarchy has a great variety of weapons, and this variety not only adds to the tactical choices you have in each mission, but it also adds to the game's atmosphere. You'll find that many of the missions have hidden boxes of weapons that add to your stash, but hunting for them doesn't get tedious because you can finish the missions without scouring every inch of the map. The game focuses on the right things: combat and the tools of combat, like interesting guns, tanks, mines, grenades, and so on. The story is told using brief cutscenes that are triggered when you reach certain points in each mission, but they're integrated into the game engine much as in Warcraft III, and if you want to skip them you can just click through.

The quality of the unit animations adds a lot to the game.

While you'll do plenty of exploring, the game revolves around periodic firefights. No character can stand being shot for more than a few seconds, and a burst from a heavy machine gun will take a character out before you have much chance to react. However, the single most important aspect of the gameplay is the fact that there is no ability to pause and issue orders. You can stop the game if you need to take a break, but this freezes the screen and prevents you from doing anything until you resume the game. For this reason, Soldiers of Anarchy actually requires a bit of dexterity with the mouse and keyboard, especially because you have to make extensive use of the two different camera modes (free and follow) to track all your soldiers. Your units will do their jobs individually even if they're widely separated, so as long as you're able to assign units to different groups and manipulate them with hotkeys while managing the camera, you should theoretically be able to get by fairly well.

Unfortunately, you can't be sure your soldiers will obey your orders, because the pathfinding in the game is terrible. And it's not even consistent--five of your characters may set off immediately for the waypoint you set for them, but the sixth may decide to run in the opposite direction for a while. Or, a group may be approaching a destination and one of your characters will suddenly veer off into the woods, loop around, and come running back. Unfortunately, this tends to happen at the most inopportune moments--otherwise, it might seem like a practical joke that the developers quietly added to the game. Unfortunately, the joke is ruined by the fact that if you order a character to sneak up on an enemy, and he decides to take an alternate route, you're most likely going to be reloading your last saved game immediately afterward. You can adjust pathfinding in the options menu, but even setting it to maximum appears to have no effect except to use more of your computer's resources and slow down the game. Silver Style's solution to this problem was apparently to put a note in the game's documentation that advises you to save often.