Valcom games took the risk back in 07 of translating and releasing an abstract wargame in the same vein as People's General. This game is an upgrade of SystemSoft's supposed seventh entry in their venrable Daisenryaku series. Daisenryaku VII exceed greets gamers with a cheaply animated fmv showing some of the modern military hardware featured in the game to a pretty shitty background theme a slot machine would feel ashamed of.
Right from the word go we can see this games budget wasn't spent on its presentation and considering how much time you'll spend actively playing the game as opposed to watching cutscenes or enjoying exotic menus this is a pretty sound choice.

Players are given the choice of tutorial, Mission mode, campaign mode, free play and a map building feature.
Tutorial mode teaches you the controls and following that mission mode lets you put more theory based actions into err, action. Missions range from ground assualts to sub hunting naval actions. Campaign mode follows shocking soon to be real world events like Russia's battles with Turkey who stand in their way of invading Israel. The challenge with writing a scenario for a war in a modern setting is actually coming up with a plausible set of events that would lead to large scale combat in an era where there hasn't been a confrontation between superpowers in 50 years. Being Japanese Daisenryaku fails at this worse than one of those novels Tom Clancy puts his name on but are written by some other guy nobody has or wants to hear about. Free play allows players to play maps earned in mission mode and campaign with the added feature of being able to save units they built into an army to use on other freeplay maps. You can also play with up to 3 friends if you have those or bots. The map editor lets you edit existing maps or create your own from scratch.

There are 8 factions. Germany,England,France, Israel, America, China, Russia and Japan. Hardware avalible to the nations is similar to their real life counter parts. With the rate the Chinese army is improving the game version comes off as a bit obsolete though it still reflects their reliance on numbers over technology in comparison to the other armies. For every other faction, units that arent't in production but are in the development stages are avalible such as the US navy's Zumwalt class destroyers. Unfortunately some additions like cyborg ninjas as an earnable unit made it into the game and hurt the authenticity. Other units made up by the developer are interesting to use.

Like advance wars captured cities give you funds and supplies and units can be built every turn unless the map dosen't allow building.
The game's most notable feature is putting everything on multiple plains. Each hex on the game map has six elevation levels. Level three being high, level zero being ground and level minus two being deep below the sea level. Maps are made of large numbers of hexes putting an emphasis on manuver. Units are disadvantaged in combat depending on what flank they're attacked from. Strong emphasis is put on the games spotting model. Units have a scan range which shows the distance they can see around them on each level(varying for each elevation). Scouts which are usually weakened mechanised infantry units are invaluable because they can see much further than your other units and can save you from running into ambushes. Also since indirect fire units like patriot missles and 155mm guns can't see as far as they can shoot, your scouts can greatly multiply the force they exert. The unit database has over 400 units which allows for a huge number of potential scenarios for players to create. SystemSoft obviously spent a lot of time reasearching the units weapons as there are distinct differences between every unit.

The music is probably the worst I've heard in a game. Songs are midi quality and go for about 30 seconds before they loop. Sound effects are decent. Aides who tell you when your turn is and announce when your units are under attack are present with servicable english but you'll most likely turn them off. Their animations are probably the games main graphical highlight. The rest is very solid and workman like. The map is fully rotatable, allows zooming and dosen't suffer from slowdown or any graphical glitches. Its also very plain with some easily identifiable textures distingushing most of the terrain features and colour coded 3d models representing each unit. The game manages to
present alot of information in a cohesive manner so I think this style of presentation is suitable. Sadly the menus aren't as effective as they could be making information on weapon ranges a bit of a pain to access (you have to count hexes) and they look pretty bad.

This game apparantly can be acquired pretty cheaply in the states but I think for the amount of replayability its worth more than its presentation gets accross. If you have any interest in modern warfare and own a ps2 I highly recommend this game.