Ogre

The Good
The gameplay is reasonably complex and the computer AI certainly provides a challenge.

The game is entirely controllable with a mouse and must be one of the earlier games to support one.

You can design your own fields to play on.

The Bad
The mouse control when placing units at the start of the game is a little fiddly. If you click anywhere near the edges of a hexagon it changes the scenery instead of placing a unit.

The actual board game itself isn't all that interesting.

The computer can only play as the ogre. This is presumably due to AI limitations as its a lot easier to direct just a single unit. If you want to play as the ogre you need a human opponent.

The Bottom Line
Ogre is based on a Steve Jackson board game. The plot as it goes, is that for various reasons warfare in the future in almost entirely tank based. The most powerful of these are cybernetic tanks known as ogres and you have to defend your command post from an attack from one of these ogre tanks.

The game takes place on a hexagonally divided board which scrolls vertically and fills two screens. As the defender you have to place all your pieces in advance, up to a preset maximum of armour/infantry points (20 each for the larger of the 2 types of ogre). You also place your command base right at the back. This base has no defenses, and the ogre can destroy it in one hit.

There are different fields to play on or you can design your own. The differences are fairly minor. Hexagons can have craters in them which makes them impassable, or they can have a line at one side representing rubble. Rubble can only be crossed by the ogre and infantry.

The defense has a variety of units, some of which move faster, others do more damage or have a longer range. For example, the howitzer is expensive to build and doesn't move at all but has a huge range and high damage. Once the game starts, the ogre itself attacks from the bottom of the screen. You would think that an army against one unit would be an unequal battle, but the ogre can file 6 missiles, 2 main cannons, 6 secondaries and 12 anti-personnel rounds in one turn. It can also just run over any of your units, and is quite fast. Gameplay is turn based - first you move, then you fire weapons. Then the ogre does the same. The exception here are the hev's which get a second movement after the firing stage. These are the fastest units, the strategy here is to get close to the ogre, shoot and then retreat out of range.

When you hit the ogre, bits start to fall off it making it much less deadly as it loses weapons and speed. You choose what to aim at and get a percentage chance of hitting. You can combine attacks to increase this percentage but you will only do the same damage if you hit as if the one unit attacked. The game finishes when the ogre destroys your base and escapes off the bottom of the screen, or if you destroy every bit of the ogre. There are degrees of victory depending upon whether the command post survives and how many units you lose.

The gameplay is quite complex and the AI does a decent enough job to make the game challenging. However, I didn't find the underlying board game all that interesting. Tactics are involved but in the end it seemed to boil down to the roll of the dice as to whether I did enough damage quickly enough. If I'm looking for a board game, I'd much rather stick to chess than play this but Origin did a decent enough job converting it for the Apple 2.