Maybe. If you only had one Andrew Jackson to satisfy the need for something new in the strategy genre, this game would be a contender.

The premise is suitably far-fetched. A time machine has enabled American soldiers to jump back in time 2 million years. They must move (ok, steal) a valuable deposit of siberite, a previously unknown ore from Siberia to the good ol’ USA. America has foolishly based its entire economy on this wonder ore, then run out. Russia has the only siberite in the world, and wants to run their own machines. The US is desperate. The discovery of the EON time machine is the break they need.

It’s a one-way mission — you don’t come back. But for the good of freedom -loving gamers everywhere, a handful of hard-bitten Marines hires on for the job. (Whatever they serve those Marines for breakfast must be good. The managers didn’t even have to promise to keep trying to find a solution to the one-way dilemma in time to bring them home. Imagine having a few gung-ho types like that around the office.)

Unfortunately, when the troops get to the time they’re assigned to, they find out that the Russians have followed them, or preceded them, who knows? They’re everywhere, they’re fully armed and they’re good shots. To win, you complete a series of small objectives as you assemble the scattered resources and keep moving. Along the way, the men and women develop experience points, you become attached, and the role-playing comes in.

It helps that the graphics are very good. Those little Marines on the screen are getting more believable all the time. The quality of the animation makes them come alive in many ways, especially in their basic walking and crawling movements. The comic book speech bubble icon adds a whimsical, familiar feel.

Each time you survive a mission, you get more battlefield smarts. You periodically lose and form new squads, pick up wandering survivors and take over vehicles. There are engineers and scientists and doctors scattered around, and they help you along. There’s a whole side of the game devoted to harnessing the indigenous ape-like creatures swarming through the forests.

I hope there is a follow-up to this game, with some suggestions to tighten the game play. It’s close, but not there yet. Here are a pair of bulleted lists to itemize my findings:

What worked:

• The terrains are very nice, with waving grass, excellent foliage, and superb attention to detail.
• Despite their coarse language and rude manners, you do start to form an attachment to the troops, and it hurts to lose one.
• The variation on the levels isn’t that bad.
• The introductory scenes where the artist’s penciling builds up in front of your eyes is absolutely enchanting.
• The cover art on the packaging reminded me of old comics such as Sgt. Nick Fury, or maybe something out of Weird War Stories or Ghost Tank.

• When I set a game option to the fastest notch, it would sure be nice if it was "stickier." I had to reset game speed every time I started a new mission.
• Some of the "conversations" between the troops went on far too long. Cut to the chase! I waited once for 30 separate dialogue balloons to lazily scroll across the screen. I didn’t easily figure out I could use the Return key to blast through the speeches.
• It would seem logical to be able to load my last save when I first start up the game, but I had to go through the whole setup each time. Please put the Load option in the initial menu. I know where I want to go better than you do.
• Save, save, save. It seemed like that was all I did to get through. Save, play, hope…repeat as necessary.
• Is it really necessary to swear, make sexual innuendos, scatological references and otherwise muck it up? If there was a prize for the most gratuitous use of swearing, this game would win hands-down.
• The engineers were incredibly valuable, and yet really stupid. They would wander into the thick of the fighting when I repeatedly tried to station them out of harm’s way. They even walked right in front of their own men, who were blazing away with rifles. Miraculously, the bullets went right through the bozos. So much for line-of-sight realism. I lost an engineer once because I told him to fix a structure and he went right around to the side where there was still fighting and began to hammer. He was shot in the back.
• I was so annoyed with the Russian captives and their "me like American hamburger" spiel I just shot them to avoid the agony of listening to them.
• Figuring out how to make the engineers add gas and oil to the vehicles was way too difficult. Give me a button to make the engineers go into "grease monkey" mode to tend to the vehicles. You had to find the supplies, pick them up, schlep them to a shelter, add to the vehicle, etc. Where’s the strategy in all this mouse-clicking?
• Add some more curves to those GI Janes, please; they tended to look the same after awhile. Whatever the perfect sprite size is to make them a little more realistic, I hope they find it.
• For a game that relies on North-South-East-West directions all the time, a fully labeled compass would be nice. I almost got East-West backwards a couple times, and I was once a geography major.
• One of the students at school mentioned a problem with his sound card when he tried to check out Original War. I was successful, but the sound isn’t that important. Voices are really good, but the words are scrolled as well. It seemed like there was plenty of room to save the last five or ten messages, but it isn’t used. In some places the conversation is short and brisk, and moves along pretty well. A turn-off valve for the painful parts would be needed if they can’t be pruned down.

Anyway, Budget Game = Budget Review. Original War has some interesting features, and it’s a good effort. It doesn’t offer the infinite value of a great product, but it has promise. Maybe that’s all you get for $20. It’s still a good deal.