SAT squarely facing off in the charts at present are the peerless Black and White, and the somewhat less heralded Cossacks: European Wars.

With very little fanfare, Cossacks has cantered to the top of the tree, but what is the key to this title's success?

Coming from the same publishers as the solid World War Two strategy game Sudden Strike, Cossacks tells the tale of the wars fought across Europe in the 200 years prior to the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars.

Here you'll find historical battles from the Thirty Year War, the Seven Year War and the Northern Wars, a time period not much troubled by wargamers.

The actual mechanics of the game will be familiar to many a real-time strategy fan. Your peasants (ever willing, but sometimes a little dim in the artificial intelligence department) must gather resources - wood, stone, iron, coal, food and gold - in order to build and feed your armies. The peasants can also build a variety of buildings from barracks to academies. So far, so Age of Empires, I hear you cry.

Ah yes, but where Cossacks really scores a hit is in the vast number of troops you can have, up to 8,000 individual units, each one of which can be controlled or formed into authentic military formations.

However, being a picky wargamer myself, the formations don't really seem to carry out the effects that they would in real life. For example, a rank is a thin line of troops which should not perform well against a cavalry charge, yet here it does, while the square, which is the formation which should excel at resisting cavalry, is instead just an option for when you are being attacked on more than one flank.

Cossacks carries a great deal more depth than the Age of Empires series, and really, when you have two nicely-formed armies facing off against one another, it all looks so right.

Cossacks really is a fine strategy game, and there is nothing quite like unleashing a screaming horde of cavalry to decimate a picturesque, unsuspecting city.

Graphics 5/5

Sound 4/5

Gameplay 4/5

Gamespan 5/5

Overall 5/5

SPECIFICATIONS: Pentium 233, 32MB RAM, 1MB graphics card, 2xCD-ROM, 400MB hard drive space.