For an overview, you play as American, Spaniard, Brit, or Indian, in a variety of scenarios familiar to any real-time strategy fan. You balance production of gold, wood and food, construct various buildings, upgrade your technology, and create increasingly powerful units to go against the enemy. The game has excellent depth; according to the literature, there are six adventures and 30 different missions. Toss in several different multiplayer modes and three difficulty settings, and you're going to find good value.

On the face, the game reminds me of Kohan - for example, there is the blare of a trumpet when fighting starts, and the game makes use of Heroes who can regenerate health. No Man's Land doesn't take the RTS genre in any breathtakingly new or exciting direction, but it does push the boundaries in some nice ways. Still, it has issues. Developed in Europe but about American history, it is a bit of an enigma at times, with a reliance on familiar stereotypes and the need to stretch history to accommodate quirky play.

For starters, I cannot figure out what the phrase "No Man's Land" has to do with Plains Indians and American settlers. I always associate it with the zone between the trenches in WWI.

But that's only the beginning. Some of the game just seemed very unfair. Judging from what most history books tell us, the Indians never settled for shooting fire arrows at the British - they stripped the dead bodies, grabbed guns and learned to use them. But in No Man's Land, the Indians are forced to endure very one-sided attacks. In one mission, the Iroquois must use spears to defend themselves against vicious attack dogs, pistol-wielding officers and mounted cavalry. At the next level, the Indians got rifles, while the Brits got cannons. Not fair!

Plus the British were constantly shooting at the women who toil in the fields, and it doesn't seem equitable to hear the lamentations of the women if those tactics aren't available to all combatants. Frequently the Brits were holed up in a near-impregnable fort, with no tilled fields in view.

The AI is actually more formidable in the multiplayer (LAN) modes. By starting up a network game and setting the opponents as computers, the tedium of the skirmishes is avoided. But you run into some familiar problems.

There is never enough food to keep the warriors flowing from the barracks, and it takes several saves to get production just right. After awhile I was thankful that there are already "published" cheat codes for additional food and resources, although they don't work in multiplayer mode naturally. The trick seemed to be chopping a lot of wood, selling it for gold, and selling the gold for food. Yawn.

I eventually got tired of prepping for assaults and swarming the opponent. It seemed like such senseless slaughter. For example, early on the Redcoats had a stronghold with brick walls and eight - 8! - towers built as protection. I couldn't find any subtle way to outrange their superior guns. Only after killing off about 150 of my brave warriors was I able to finally get the fort burned to the ground. Any compassionate commander would blanche at such brutal butchery and figure out how to poison their water or something.

Graphics are good, occasionally great. The cut scenes are awesome. But elsewhere there are some subtle issues. For example, efficient labor units are female, but you can't zoom in on them to like, check them out. You can barely tell they have jugs. The railroad sometimes comes into the station as an unwatchably choppy image that could use some smoothing. Conversely, the use of torches and fires was excellent. It seemed to be constantly snowing or raining, mildly interesting, but the ocean waves were decent and water in general was well done, right down to the view of fish swimming under the surface.

One scenario started with a canoe voyage where the Indians immediately got themselves cornered in a shoals with no way out. They leaped overboard, but the game wouldn't let them climb ashore. How dumb is that? The real trick was to get them OUT of the canoe and across to the other shore before they started to paddle. Quickly enough, the extra guys were slain and only the chief remained to walk his lonely road. Those were the least enjoyable levels, but at least they were different.

There is a definite Hollywood-movie influence to the game, probably excusable for the European developers, who seemed to grow up watching re-runs of F-Troop and The Wild Wild West. Humorous stereotypes abound - the term "pale face" is actually used, as is the archaic term "Happy Hunting Ground." Caucasian leaders are invariably fat and coarse, while Indian leaders are lean and spiritual, filled with wisdom and calling everyone "brother."

Fortunately, the game offers up a lot of the best parts of modern RTS titles. You can queue up production and upgrades so that as resources are exploited, units are created. You can zoom in and out, although as a bona fide lech I would have liked to see if those were really bare-breasted Iroquois women. Unfortunately, you can't zoom in that far.

While there was some production polish evident, all is not well. Here are some of the bugs and nits I encountered in my version:

I managed to get about 30 guys locked up when a buffalo died ON a tree. They couldn't make steaks and they couldn't get off each other. It was sad.

When I tried to jump in and out using the Windows combos ALT-ESC and ALT-TAB to alternate between playing and writing notes, I locked things up repeatedly and had to reboot.

Please do not use circles and loops for rivers when designing a mission! It offends all geographic and topographic sensibilities.

There are no "steppes" in North America. That's a Euro term that doesn't fit here. Use the term "prairie" instead.

One nice feature is the ability to find the hero instantly by clicking his image in the bottom right corner and gaining control instantly. Sometimes he has a tendency to get lost, and although zooming in can be helpful, it's nice to be able to just snag him and draw him out of a crowd that is under attack. If the hero dies the mission fails, so controlling him is always important.

Likewise, there is a button for finding all idle workers, handy when they are out lost in the forest supposedly chopping down trees. Other nice touches, in no particular order: autosaves, unlimited saves, short technology ladders, ability to control features with check boxes, and good background music.

The voice work was a little weak. Some of the Indians sounded a bit wimpy, for lack of a better term. Also, during some of the pre-mission cut scenes, the voices of the debating characters sounded so similar it was confusing. It wasn't really clear what the addition of a conflict between Indian chiefs added, either.

Still, the worst nit to fix is the balance. Here's a "fer instance:" you get only so many warriors when hunting buffalo, and the white man is out there as well. They have rifles, but you only have bows and arrows. Naturally, they slaughter you if they find you, unless you outnumber them about three to one. But when starting the level, you can't make more warriors because the game says you are out of food. So you're stuck until you figure out you need to pack up the travois and move to where the buffalo roam to shorten the transportation route. Fortunately the buffalo will often wander right through camp if you place it correctly, and the meat can then pile up quickly. But it takes so long to get the hang of it, the player's frustration will grow quickly.

Even worse, design-wise, is to find out that the Indian chief won't soil his hands slicing buffalo steaks and helping out bringing meat back to the teepee. And the game insists that Indians can't transport meat while on horseback. Both of those design flaws are historically bogus and only seem to mess up the balance.

What really drove me nuts about the game was the number of levels where you just navigate your main hero around and around, running away whenever possible, while the game tosses up vicious dogs, pistoleros, and riflemen to block you. It's just annoying, and when I finally decided the only reason I was playing was to see if the next level got better, I just stopped skirmishing. That's not good gameplay, and certainly not good design.

Back on the positive side, it was very gratifying to circle the bad guys and send volleys of arrows or rifle shots into them. Using mounted riders against the buffalo is a lot of fun as well. More of that spirit is needed. Since the Indians clearly have the moral high ground, there should be a tendency of the game to reward them and encourage playing their side. The designers did a good job with the spiritual strength of American Indians, with mystical totem poles and conjured animal spirits. Yet the technology of the opponents was so formidable, the slaughter was obscene. If I want more guilt I can watch Dances With Wolves; I don't need that much angst from a computer game.

So basically, the game is not a history lesson, is not particularly well balanced, and is a little too linear for my taste. None of those are particularly fatal, and the next time around this game may be a whole lot better. It has some nice features, and is worth a look if you like the genre. I give the producers high marks for the production values, including adequate documentation, but I have to admit that after more hours than I care to admit, I lost interest and decided to move on. You an only shoot so many buffalo.