My first review for Strategy Zone Online is up. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath is a Cold War era RTS set in a world where Kennedy and Khrushchev didn’t reach a peaceful settlement of the 1962 crisis.

I liked it a little better than most reviewers have. It’s not a recommendation – even at a score in the high sixties. Quirks of the site’s scoring system lead to a score that high. But I do think that it has something that game designers should take a look at.

CMC has an innovative turn-based campaign mode that, with a better skirmish game underneath, could have made it stand out as a major title. Instead, poor map design and some really difficult missions mean that the campaign mode will be ignored by most gamers.