DRAK is a game of unit management. Keeping your fighting force viable for the duration of the mission and properly managing your support units is critical to your success. This adds a definite degree of strategy to the game and also gives you plenty of tactical options for achieving your objectives. This is DRAK’s greatest strength but unfortunately it is its greatest weakness as well. Properly coordinating all of these units requires a good degree of micromanagement that is made quite difficult by the game’s poor pathfinding AI. Units have a hard time making their way around obstacles and their reaction is completely unpredictable. Sometimes they’ll look for an alternate path while at other times they’ll simply come to a complete stop. Sometimes they’ll start to make their way down an alternate route, only to stop halfway along the way. Groups also have a difficult time remaining cohesive on their way to their destination. Faster units will race ahead while slower ones will lag further and further behind. Traffic jams are not an infrequent occurrence. All of this means that you must constantly keep an eye on moving troops to ensure that they get to their destination and do so in one piece. There are other AI quirks in the game besides pathfinding. For example, foot soldiers can be given a command to lie prone but you must give them the order explicitly. For some reason your soldiers can’t figure out to go prone when taking machine gun fire, so unless you are watching your soldiers and are ready to take them prone in an instant you are going to lose a lot of infantry to enemy fire.

Stuka 1 - Tank 0

In spite of these issues, DRAK can provide for some fun strategy gameplay. The game has a lot of nice little touches such as the ability to target specific parts of a vehicle and to capture abandoned enemy vehicles. The graphics are also good, with the environments and units rendered in full 3D. The game camera works quite well giving you full scroll, rotate, and zoom capabilities. The maps are 3D as well, giving you the opportunity to use the terrain to your tactical advantage. While the game’s setting necessitates a lot of brown and tan. The maps look good and present a realistic desert environment.

The sound is a mix of good and bad. The sound effects are topnotch, and the sound of bullets ricocheting off of metal, tank engines revving up, and trees and fences crashing down are all amazingly realistic. The bad side of the game’s sound rears its ugly head whenever there is a voiceover. The poor voice acting is made even more difficult to bear by the awful attempts to mimic national accents. Thankfully the voiceovers primarily occur during cutscenes and these scenes can all be bypassed by hitting the escape key.

Once you complete the game’s campaigns, you can access any of the missions directly for play. Unfortunately there is no skirmish mode where you can just set-up a quick battle to the finish against the computer. The game does have a multiplayer mode, but there are only three multiplayer maps available, only deathmatch and capture the flag modes, and there is no in-game match browser. However, you can look for matches via GameSpy arcade. Better multiplayer support along with the ability to create quick matches by including AI opponents would have gone a long way to extending the replay value of the title and the game’s overall enjoyment. As it stands, though, once you complete the campaign you’ll probably soon lose interest in the game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 74%.  It has its quirks and shortcomings, but Desert Rats vs Afrika Korps is enjoyable enough to recommend to RTS fans looking for a little World War II combat.

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