Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i APC

TECH BRIEF Microsoft’s rush to embed an all-seeing AI assistant into Windows resulted in the company shipping a product to beta testers that contained huge security flaws, forcing the company to delay the launch of the flagship feature for the new Copilot+ PCs. Recall was the big announcement from Microsoft’s Build conference in late May, with the company keen to further its AI advantage over Apple, which subsequently announced “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC a fortnight later. Recall was hawked as an AI assistant that would allow you to “retrace your steps” on your PC, with the AI remembering everything you’ve done on the system. It does this by screenshotting the whole screen every few seconds, with the information transcribed into a plain text SQLite database. But as security researchers quickly…

“Let’s just admire the things that Humane and Rabbit did right, cringe at its shortcomings (like awful battery life), and wait to see how this new class of hardware evolves” RABBIT R1 MAJOR TECH SPECS • 2.3-GHz MediaTek P35 MT6765 eight-core SoC• 2.88-inch touchscreen• 4GB RAM, 128GB storage• 8MP stills camera (3,264 x 2,448) with 1080p 24fps video• Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi with 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz, 4G LTE, GPS• 1,000mAh battery• 115g KEY FINDINGS • The battery is lithium-polymer, clocking 1,000mAh. A bigger one is needed, given how fast it goes through a charge. • The main housing contains a large motor and gear combo that powers the swivel mechanism on the R1’s camera. Attached is the camera sensor and Hall Effect sensor. • The camera, LCD panel, and…

Philips Evnia 49M2C8900L Hankering after a dual monitor set-up? Then you might want to consider this 48.9-inch ultra-wide display. Ostensibly aimed at gamers, it’s packed with exactly the kind of tech that’ll make you drool – from a quantum dot OLED (QD-OLED) 1800R curved screen with support for up to 99% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut to a resolution of 5120x1440 pixels. Plus, it also has a 0.3 millisecond response time for slick movie viewing as well as game playing. The icing on the cake, though, are the 49M2C8900L’s added extras. For not only does it boast Ambiglow, the Philips ambient lighting technology that splashes colours on the wall behind the monitor to create a more immersive viewing experience, it also has DTS Sound with a 30W-output sound system. The…

PRICE $1,799 WEB hp.com Designed to be an all-rounder, the HP Pavilion 16 is a large 16in screen laptop that is still thin and light enough to carry on the go every day. Our test model (16-ag0000AU) features a Ryzen 7 CPU and integrated graphics, but there are also Intel Core and Ultra configurations that can include higher resolution displays and discrete GPUs. The screen on the Pavilion 16 uses a 16:10 ratio, with a 1920 x 1200 resolution, 300 nit brightness and 62.5% sRGB colour gamut coverage. The Ryzen 7 8840U is quite new (released Dec 2023) and offers 8 cores (16 threads) that can boost to 5.1GHz. You get a big 1TB SSD but the 16GB of RAM (2x 8GB) is low profile, so soldered in and not…

PRICE $79 WEB www.deepcool.com Over the years Deepcool has earned a reputation for providing highly functional cases without exorbitant price tags. The CH160 looks like yet another example. It costs just $79, so it already offers excellent value for money. But there’s more to the CH160 than just a budget price tag. The CH160 is a Mini-ITX case that’s available in both black and white versions. It’s on the larger side for an ITX case at 336×200×283.5mm (L×W×H) but that’s very much a conscious decision as the CH160 is designed to be compatible with large air coolers. Even a cooler the size of a Noctua NH-D15 is well within the CH160’s 172mm limit. It’ll also accept triple slot GPUs at up to 305mm in length (with an SFX PSU), meaning…

MAC PRICE From $14.49 NEEDS macOS 13 or later WEB omnigroup.com Keeping on top of all those everyday tasks of life and work is often too demanding for Notes and Reminders, and merits closer integration with more dedicated features. OmniFocus has sufficient flexibility and power to handle tasks ranging from a brief course of dental treatment to moving house or setting up a business, and borders on full-blown project management. It has also been endorsed by David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, as an ideal platform for applying the techniques he advocates. Its success depends largely on its interface. Version 4 of OmniFocus brings a novel and near-perfect solution with its Fluid outlines, using Apple’s SwiftUI, that adapt to available information. Add an Action to a project and set…

Windows isn’t free software. You may not have paid for it directly, but when you buy a new PC with Windows preinstalled the price includes a licence to run the operating system. Normally this will be what’s called an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) licence, meaning it’s tied to the specific hardware. In other words, it allows you to run Windows on that specific computer, but not to move it onto another machine. This has both practical and legal implications. If you’ve ever performed a major hardware upgrade on a desktop PC – such as replacing the motherboard – you may have found that Windows thinks it’s no longer running on the same machine, and requires you to reactivate the OS. Similarly, when you move Windows 10 from physical hardware into…

How many bays do I need? We strongly advise you to steer clear of single-disk NAS systems. If a single disk holds the only copy of your irreplaceable data and it fails, you’re in trouble. It’s much safer to go for a two-bay system and configure it with two hard disks in a RAID1 array. In this configuration, your data is mirrored between both drives. If one fails, you’ll still have the copy on the other one. Just be sure to replace the broken disk promptly so the NAS can rebuild your array and restore your protection. Don’t be tempted by other two-disk configurations such as JBOD or RAID0: these offer more capacity and can be faster, but they lack the fault tolerance of RAID1. A four-bay NAS drive is…

$858 | qnap.com Many cheaper NAS enclosures must appeal to the crossover between home power users and the lower end of the business market. QNAP’s TS-253E has its sights set chiefly on the latter. It’s a two-bay NAS, capable of accepting 3.5in or 2.5in SATA disks, and packing a further two slots for NVMe SSDs. QNAP markets the TS-253E as a long-term model, which it says will be sold and supported up until 2029. That makes it ideal for businesses intending to roll it out in a standard, easily supported configuration across multiple workgroups, outlets or branch offices. The TS-253E has a similar spec to QNAP’s TS-264 (see p85), but it makes do with a less sprightly Intel Celeron J6412 processor. This is paired with 8GB of onboard RAM, which…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER Embed fonts in documents to avoid problems when sharing If you feel the selection of available fonts in LibreOffice Writer is too limited, you can add new ones. Visit www.fontget.com/discover/libreoffice/, select a font you like, then click Download Font. Extract the ZIP file, then highlight all the TTF files within, right-click the selection then click Install. In our example, we added the Caladea font and typed some text using it ( 1 in our screenshot below). If you want to share a document using a new font with someone on a different PC, you’ll have to embed the font so they’ll be able to open the document without experiencing any problems. Click File at the top left, then ‘Properties…’. Now click the Font tab 2 in the box…

The games we play PRICE $89.95 PLATFORM PC WEB homeworlduniverse.com Homeworld 3 wants to remind you of its legacy a lot, especially in the campaign. After the events of Homeworld 2, Karan S’jet, the mothership’s navigator, was sent on a mission to deal with a looming crisis, but she never returned. Twenty years later her protégé, Imogen S’jet, is following in her footsteps, with a new mothership and a new fleet that must strike out on their own, once again without support. But where the original Homeworld often took a minimalist approach – from its narrative to its map design – Homeworld 3 is comparatively busier, with maps full of debris and terrain, and a story that constantly wants you to take a break from the fun stuff so you…

Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past When you consider the list of machines that have made use of Zilog’s Z80 microprocessor chip, it reads like a computing equivalent of Who’s Who. Having burst onto the tech scene on the back of a 1976 advert that pitted the Z80 squarely against Intel’s 8080A in a so-called “Battle of the 80s”, Zilog’s single chip ended up being used in Sinclair’s ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Amstrad’s CPC and PCW ranges, the TRS-80, the Osborne-1, a host of early Sega consoles and many more machines besides. You’ll find it in the Amstrad NC-100 and NC-200, the TRS-800 Model 100 and Sinclair’s Cambridge Z88. You’ll spot it inside graphing calculators made by Texas Instruments and Amstrad’s ill-fated E-mailer telephone. There was a Zilog Z80…

35 Microsoft Surface Laptop 15 36 HP Pavilion 16 37 Asus ROG Strix Scope II RX 38 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD 39 2TB Lexar NM790 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD 40 2TB Seagate FireCuda 540 SSD 41 32GB Crucial Pro Overclocking DDR5 42 Deepcool CH160 case 43 Benq X500i 4K Short Throw Projector APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals,…

PRICE $189 WEB asus.com Mechanical keyboards for the average Joe are a bit unique these days. Because the market and the enthusiast space has advanced so rapidly over the last few years, long gone are the times when manufacturers could forgo sound-dampening, and use any old Cherry switch or a discounted alternative on their boards. After all, why buy an off-the-shelf product when you can build a board specifically for your needs? Layout size, switch-type, foam dampening, keycaps, cable – all of it can be customised to your liking. That puts the traditional manufacturers in a tricky position when it comes to designing new product lines, and it’s very much a case of ‘adapt or die’. “Why buy an off-the-shelf product when you can build a board specifically for your…

PRICE $579 WEB Seagate.com Well folks, here we have it: Seagate’s top-tier, flagship PCIe 5.0 drive that you can pick up right now. It’s not quite as blisteringly quick as some of its like-minded competitors, at least not on the sequentials, but it is nippy in other areas. Let’s dive in. The FireCuda 540 is pretty similar to a number of 5.0 drives out there right now. In fact, it’s genuinely quite sad just how similar all these drives are. At its heart, the 540 features a 232-layer TLC NAND developed by Micron, Phison’s E26 PCIe 5.0 controller, and an LPDDR4 DRAM cache as well, all baked into the M.2 2280 form-factor. One key difference, however, lies in the warranty, and that’s the fact this comes with an endurance rating…

PRICE $2,599 WEB benq.com Projectors are still difficult to justify on so many levels. The biggest reason is what kind of screen tech we have available to us. No matter how you spin it, a 4K gaming projector’s main advantage is screen size. Everything else, from colour accuracy and latency to image clarity, is superseded by the monitor tech we have, typically at far lower prices, too. If you’re looking at a projection unit like this to replace your desktop monitor, we’d say that it’s not worth considering. If you want a beefy 42-inch monitor, then you can grab something like Asus’s ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ, complete with 137 Hz refresh rate, 0.1ms response time, and 4K 41.5-inch panel for less than $1,499. If you want something ultrawide, then Alienware’s…

DEVELOPER Fedora Project WEB https://fedoraproject.org LICENCE Mainly GPL Fedora is developed by the community-based Fedora project. It’s the upstream source for both CentOS Stream and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). There are two major OS releases every year, targeted for the fourth Tuesday in April and October. Releases are supported for just 13 months. This review focuses on Fedora 40, which at the time of writing is still in beta, so we encourage you to download and test features for yourself. This is easier said than done, as visitors to the main website will find there are five editions of flagship Fedora alone: Workstation, Server, CoreOS, IoT and Cloud. It is also available in a variety of spins, such as the immutable Atomic Desktops, and those with alternative desktop environments like…

MSI SHOWS OFF A COMPLETE RANGE OF PC PRODUCTS, AND IT’S NOT AFRAID TO INNOVATE. After a couple of quiet years following the pandemic, this year’s Computex was back with a vengeance. Of all the times we’ve visited Computex, we’ve never seen so many people crammed into the Nangang Exhibition Center, and MSI’s booth was a perfect illustration of this post-COVID rebound. It was absolutely overflowing with people. The component section of MSI’s booth contained many of the things we have come to expect from a Computex showcase. There were lots of monitors, motherboards, graphics cards, cooling, SSDs, and the occasional oddball product. CAMM2 COMETH MSI showed off two particularly interesting products: CAMM2 memory and its Project Zero backside-connector ecosystem. If both see widespread adoption, they will represent the biggest…

$889 | asustor.com Asustor’s Nimbustor 4 AS5404T is a four-drive NAS enclosure aimed at demanding home users or small offices. It’s a performance-focused NAS thanks to the fairly muscular Intel Celeron N5105 processor and 4GB of RAM. At the back you’ll find two 2.5GbE ports, along with two of the NAS’s three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 sockets – the other one is easily accessed at the front. The NAS can mount up to four 3.5in or 2.5in SATA disks in various RAID configurations including RAID5, 6 and 10. Unusually, it also has four NVMe slots. You could configure the AS5404T with a four-SSD RAID5 volume, alongside a slower disk-based storage pool. Alternatively, you could use an SSD cache to accelerate disk performance, or compromise with one or two SSDs on…

$789 | synology.com Synology’s DiskStation DS423+ is a home and small office NAS, offering four SATA drive bays, and supporting up to a whopping 72TB of storage. With a Celeron J4125 processor and 2GB of RAM, it’s similarly specified to the two-bay DS224+. Unfortunately, that extends to its dual gigabit Ethernet ports, which look like a mis-step when many competitors now offer 2.5GbE. Synology hasn’t been overly generous when it comes to other ports, either. You won’t find HDMI here, and there are only two USB-A 3.2 ports – and they’re the slower, 5Gbits/sec Gen 1. The DS423+ does have a trick up its sleeve in the shape of two NVMe SSD slots. Drives in these can be configured as a cache for hard disk volumes, used to create a…

Are VPNs toast? I’ve been reading a news story on the TunnelVision vulnerability for virtual private networks. Apparently, this – excuse the pun – tunnel-sized hole in VPN security has existed since 2002. It says the vulnerability allows attackers to force VPN apps to send and receive at least some of your traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel. The claim is that you’re only safe when the VPN runs on an Android device or Linux PC. Is this true, and if so, does it mean the VPN networks I’ve been using for all these years have been utterly useless in all that time? Caitlin H Tracey APC Responds: The headline of this vulnerability does make for grim reading. That said, in practical terms, the risk can be minimised and even…

CHROME Turn any website into a desktop app A few years ago, progressive web apps (PWAs) were touted as the future of the web. These effectively turn websites into apps, which you can launch from your desktop without opening your browser first. Although Chrome, Edge and Brave support PWAs, the popularity of the technology has been limited by the lack of compatible sites. You may have noticed an ‘Install [site name]’ icon in your address bar on websites including Argos, Outlook, Google Drive, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), to indicate PWA support, but most sites haven’t yet added the option. To remedy this, Google is testing a feature in Chrome that lets you turn any website into a desktop app, whether it supports PWAs or not. To try the option,…

PRICE $69.95 PLATFORM PC, PS4/5, XB1/S/X WEB motogpvideogame.comu While the more enjoyable bits of the last game’s challenge remain in this year’s outing, these are slightly more forgiving 1,000cc beasts than 2023’s machinery. The dreaded ‘pick-up effect’, in which the bike stood itself up more as throttle was applied, narrowing lean angle and thus cornering trajectory, has been all but nerfed. Kerbs feel slightly less deadly to venture a wheel onto, and stopping the bike feels kinder too. Meanwhile, the race stewards have been imbued with a keener eye on AI riders’ nonsense. Joining these newly fastidious stewards on the podium of new stuff is an updated rider market system that sees other riders from the MotoGP class, as well as Moto2 and Moto3 categories, moving between teams. A simple…

PRICE $36.50 PLATFORM PC, PS5, XBS/X WEB indikathegame.com Indika is a misfit Russian Orthodox nun on a mission. She’s tasked with delivering a note to the Danilov monastery, which is a welcome reprieve, because the other nuns in her own monastery hate her guts. Little wonder, though: she’s not a very good nun. The trip is fated to go spectacularly wrong, and that’s no spoiler, because the tone of Indika immediately warns us that we’ve entered a redemption-free zone. Across the six hours it took me to complete, our doomed hero moves through a succession of bleak, dehumanising environments, solves a bunch of puzzles, survives some utterly miserable encounters, fails to achieve anything she set out to do, and then must go on living. It didn’t make me feel good,…

Everything you need to know from the month in tech As Microsoft continues rolling out updates to Windows 11 and its included software that most people didn’t ask for, alarm bells have rung with the redesign of the Windows 11 Weather app – an app that now appears to be not only less functional but seems to have been made worse just to place yet more advertisements. This was most thoroughly observed by user @ChangeWindows in their X thread. Microsoft has already received much criticism for adding egregious ads to nearly every facet of Windows 11, a paid operating system – the most egregious of them all being Start Menu Ads. The advertisements in an already-paid operating system have received plenty of backlash, and now Microsoft seems to be doing…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Forget typing and mousing. We’ve been trying for years to come up with new ways to interface with computers, be it eye-trackers, mind-reading tech or VR-powered immersive systems. And among APC staff (past and present), it’s become a joke. Yet here I am, typing into a laptop and staring into a monitor, just like a chump from the 1980s. But perhaps not for much longer if Apple and Google have their way, with announcements on eye-tracking plus head and face movement recognition. Such technologies were created for people with accessibility challenges, and that’s also the origin of eye trackers and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Hopefully, by integrating such accessibility tools into mainstream tech, iPads and other computing devices…

ARC PRICE Free WEB arc.net GOOGLE CHROME PRICE Free WEB google.com/chrome Things have been relatively quiet in the world of web browsers for a while, if you overlook Microsoft’s constant pressure on Windows users to switch to Edge. The MS browser has greatly improved since the switch to Google’s rendering engine, Blink, itself a fork of Apple’s older Webkit engine used in Safari. Microsoft also has Trident (Internet Explorer) and EdgeHTML (older versions of Edge), while Firefox runs on Gecko. There are others, too. These engines affect the way websites, which exist as lines of code and image files on a server somewhere, are displayed on your computer. The differences between them mean they don’t always render web content identically, especially in these days of embedded content, multiple coding languages, and…

PRICE $3,699 WEB microsoft.com From the outside the Surface Laptop is a very normal looking laptop that might even be boring if not for the range of colours available. It’s a premium all-metal design that (finally!) favours robust repairability over being extra slim and light. Still, the 1.83cm thickness and 1.66 kg weight is perfectly fine for carrying on the go. The Surface Laptop is a CoPilot+ PC, but at the time of writing the new AI enhanced features are very limited, or yet to arrive, so we won’t cover them in any detail here. The 15in Surface laptop is equipped with the 12-core Snapdragon Elite X CPU, which also includes a Qualcomm Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU. The 32GB of RAM is soldered in, so can’t be upgraded, but…

PRICE $239 WEB kingston.com SSDs are, on the surface, quite boring. They don’t have the graphical fidelity of a GPU, they can’t render 4K video files, or act as the beating heart of your machine like a CPU, and they aren’t as critical to your system’s operations as RAM. In fact, you can get away without using one of them at all. A simple HDD will allow you to run a machine and do all of those things you know and love, just more slowly. So why have we’ve got so excited over this drive? Surely, at its heart it’s just another boring SSD with slightly better sequentials, right? Well, yes, but also no. Kingston has produced some fantastic drives, but in the world of cutting edge PCIe 5.0 storage…

PRICE $180 WEB crucial.com For the longest time, two of the biggest names in the memory market have been Corsair and Crucial. They’re without a doubt some of the largest manufacturers out there, with some serious market share both on the enterprise level and to us consumers as well. Corsair has perhaps made itself more prominently known on that front, particularly with its Dominator and Vengeance series (although Crucial certainly has tried in the past with its Ballistix line), but all in all, these two juggernauts have been at it for many, many years, battling to and fro over ever-tightening market-share. Why is that relevant? Well, let’s just say that when it comes to performance, these two are the kings, and our memory kit on test today, Crucial’s Pro Overclocking,…

NEEDS Windows 10 or 11, macOS or Linux WEB www.audacityteam.org It’s nearly 22 years since the first stable version of Audacity was released, and it’s still the best free audio editor around. Version 3.5 further expands the program’s capabilities without cluttering its distinctive waveform interface. The most notable addition is the ability to save your Audacity projects online using its free hosting service Audio.com. Introduced in version 3.2, Audio.com originally just let you share files with other people by uploading them to your account, then sending a private link to your intended listeners. It now works more like a cloud-storage service, letting you access your audio files from any computer and collaborate on projects with fellow Audacity users. Sign up for a free account at https://audio.com, then when you’re ready…

Network-attached storage (NAS) may be one of the dullest sounding technologies, but in practice it’s one of the most brilliant. Sure, buying a NAS drive can be an important part of any backup strategy, but thanks to the range of apps found on modern NAS devices they now serve a range of uses. For a start, they can save you a lot of money in the long term by replacing subscription services. They can act as your own gigantic Dropbox, allowing you to share files with friends, family and colleagues in a way that you control. That’s particularly useful for photos and videos that you’ve captured over the years. Then there’s the other type of video: films. Load up Plex, for instance, and you can stream your collection whenever and…

$649 | qnap.com QNAP makes so many NAS enclosures that it can be hard to place specific models within the range. The TS-264 comes under the “Mid-range First Choice” bracket, which is QNAP’s way of saying it’s intended for small offices, homes and micro businesses. The “2” tells you this is a two-bay device, accepting up to two 3.5in or 2.5in drives. Inside there are NVMe slots capable of accepting up to two 2TB SSDs, which can be used as storage or an SSD cache for the hard disks. QNAP pairs an Intel Celeron N5095 processor with 8MB of onboard RAM, which can’t be further upgraded. At the back you’ll find an HDMI socket, two 2.5GbE connectors, two USB-A 2 ports and a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, with another…

$759 | terra-master.com TerraMaster’s F4-424 looks exactly like a four-bay version of the disappointing F2-212, but don’t be fooled. It’s a thoroughly upgraded device, featuring an Intel N95 processor – one of the more powerful CPUs that you’ll find in a NAS at this level. It’s paired with 8GB of DDR5 RAM, which is handy enough, but you can upgrade to a maximum 32GB, though doing so means binning the 8GB SODIMM already fitted. Despite keen pricing, the F4-424 is a nicely designed product. Its four tool-less drive caddies slide in and out smoothly, while at the rear there’s a single 12cm fan – quieter and more effective than two smaller fans. Here you’ll also find an HDMI port, along with USB-C and USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 connectors. As you’d…

LABS | NAS DRIVES $889 | qnap.com The QNAP TS-464 is a midrange, four-bay NAS enclosure that supports 3.5in and 2.5in SATA drives. It’s otherwise essentially identical to the two-bay TS-264 (see p85), which is no bad thing: it means a strong specification that includes two 2.5GbE network ports, an Intel Celeron N5095 processor and 8GB of RAM. Open it up and you’ll also find NVMe slots for up to two 2TB SSDs. There’s scope for upgrades, too, in the shape of a dual-port PCI-E 10GbE network card and multiple expansion drive options. The TS-464 supports the full range of disk configurations you’d expect in a four-bay NAS, including RAID5, 6 and 10. You can also migrate from a two-disk RAID1 array to three- or four-disk RAID5, giving you an…

WINDOWS 11 Control your cursor using your voice Another new feature in Moment 5 (see below) is a grid that lets you use your voice to move your mouse to a specific part of your screen. If you haven’t set up ‘voice access’, search for it in Windows then open it. You’ll then need to click Download at the top and follow the instructions to install. Once complete, say “voice access wake up”. Say “mouse grid” and a 3x3 grid will appear on your screen, numbered 1-9. Now say which numbered box you want your cursor to move to – for example, “mouse grid one”. The cursor will then move to that part of the screen, inside a smaller 3x3 grid. In our example (pictured below), we’ve said “mouse grid…

HELP STATION | MAC IT WILL TAKE 10 mins YOU WILL LEARN How to find characters and make changes to accomplish things more easily YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.4 or later Your keyboard may feel fixed but it’s more adaptable than you may imagine. With a few tweaks, you can put a host of extra functions at your fingertips, making it easier to type and navigate applications. Maybe create your own macOS keyboard shortcuts and edit any of the existing ones. Or assign specific functions to keys and go beyond the character set you see printed on the keyboard, even making use of different language layouts. By investing a small amount of time exploring the options, you can use your Mac like a pro. It’s even possible, via System Settings >…

PRICE $65.95 PLATFORM PC, Linux WEB tinyurl.com/APC535men No other strategy game in this recent real-time strategy resurgence can deliver moments quite like this: a single soldier on a mounted machine-gun holding off a hundred enemy infantry, a lucky artillery shell wiping out a terrifying enemy tank, or a brave paratrooper demolishing your opponent’s defences by crawling up to a defensive line with a satchel filled with explosives. These moments will leave you feeling elated, and crafting a dynamic sandbox in which they can happen is a massive achievement. Original developer BestWay shows a deft eye for creating drama out of what could be meaningless death. Combat in Men of War II feels mechanically deep and incredibly satisfying when you get it right. Instead of the traditional rock, paper, scissors style…