Sabre Team

STORY / GAMEPLAY:
Once fully armed, the team is off to the plane to be deployed into the combat zone. When deployed, the main game screen is viewed in an isometric mode and really works well. At the start of each mission, there certain positions which are highlighted by squares which are used for parachuting and loading in. The system used for controlling your lads is that of action points first seen (back then) in the classic Laser Squad title. Every action a team member performs takes a certain amount of action-points. When initial quota reaches zero, it's on to another member. When all the team has moved, it's on to the opposition and so on. Combat is just a case of spotting the enemy and deciding how much ammo to use them - too much and you'll waste it and have to use up action points reloading sooner, but not enough.
There are five missions available to complete:
Mission 1 (Jungle POW Camp) is situated within the prisoner of war camp with four prisoners, which need to be collected and guided to safety. When a hostage is collected, by walking within space of him, he can be controlled as a member of your team. Hostages are air-lifted to safety once outside the POW camp. All surviving hostages must be rescued, with a minimum of three required to complete the mission. Once all the hostages have been rescued you must guide the remaining members of your team out of the camp to safety.
Mission 2 (Embassy Siege) is situated in an American Embassy, where terrorists have taken control and are holding four hostages. To complete the mission you either collect and rescue al hostages (as in Mission 1) OR kill all terrorists.
Mission 3 (War games) is situated within an underground military base, where four machines containing missile launch codes must be destroyed (by shooting them at least 3 times). Then, you need to guide surviving team members to safety.
Mission 4 (Liner Hijack) is situated within an ocean liner, where terrorists had highjacked, holding innocent passengers and crew members hostage. Kill all terrorists, and you're done.
Mission 5 (Missile Guidance) is situated within a missile manufacturing plant, where four machines which program missile guidance systems must be destroyed. Then, you need to guide surviving team members to safety as well.
Sabre Team is an excellent tactical, but rather tough game, combining well action and adventure gameplay on a massive scale. However it is much too short - it contains only five missions, but hopefully, there a couple of mission disks released, adding extra missions. The negative side for most of the players is that, it takes ages (at times) for the computer to work out its moves (same as with chess games back then running on relative low-speed CPUs for such a cause). The ideas in the game work really well and it is quite entertaining to play, if it wasn't for that damn slow computer thinking.

GRAPHICS / SOUND:
As with the gameplay, graphics and sound are both high quality. Unlike some other strategy games of its era, Sabre Team is very pleasing to look at, with clear display and attractive graphics. The pseudo-3D view works really well and in any case do not expect a 50 frames scrolling and sprite animation here. No need to.
Sound is great, offering sampled sound effects of gun firing, explosions etc, while the music during gameplay is top notch (as well as the intro and main-menu tunes).