As much as I'd call myself a strategy enthusiast, it's always been difficult for me to get into the really crunchy, grognardy, rivet-counting wargames like Gary Grigsby's War in the East or Combat Mission. Of all of the recent Paradox grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron 4 is the one I have the fewest hours in. That ultimately comes down to the fact that I am, at heart, a roleplay dork. I care more about whether two characters are going to kiss than what caliber cannon is fitted on my medium tank.

So from the first time I saw Burden of Command—a new take on World War 2 tactics that bills itself as a "leadership RPG"—I was immediately intrigued. And after stumbling through its somewhat cumbersome tutorial, I found that it was just what I'd been waiting for.

"RPG" might be a bit off the mark. The way I would actually describe Burden of Command is as a tactical World War 2 visual novel, which is just as offbeat and interesting as it sounds. Taking on the role of an American lieutenant in 1942 and commanding a platoon through basic training and eventually the first wave of Yanks to land in North Africa, there are two main modes of play woven together.

You have tactical, grid-based combat with line of sight, cover, and suppression that could be mistaken for one of those grognard games I mentioned. But you also have text-based interstitials featuring colorized period photography, and occasionally even taped interviews with real WW2 veterans. These include many small and large decisions that can affect how you develop as an officer and the fate of your men.

Your officer has a few personality traits that exist almost entirely just for flavor:

• Sarcasm, denoting how often you deal with stress like a Buffy character
• Directness, measuring your inclination to skip the formalities and get to the point of a matter
• And verbosity, which affects how likely you are to pipe up during a briefing scene rather than just clicking through it to get to the next mission.

Your reputation for any of the above might be commented on by other characters and earn you nicknames like "chatterbox."

More impactful are the approaches your character adopts, which can each give mechanical bonuses in battle and unlock options in certain narrative decisions. You can be an officer who leads by the book, focusing on Discipline, for example. Or you can face every challenge with a sort of heroic bravado, specializing in Zeal. I started out with a core value of Compassionate, hoping to prioritize saving as many lives as I could.

But I quickly pivoted to the Clever approach, as I found that was actually the way to save the most lives at the end of the day. Concern and an open heart aren't enough. You have to be crafty and effective.

The US Rifle Company you'll be commanding is led by a captain and composed of four platoons that each have a lieutenant in charge, and these five officers are the only ones who have visible combat stats. There are also a handful of named sergeants and privates, however, whose under-the-hood personalities can be shaped by your decisions in ways that can affect how they behave in the future. These characters, notably, can die—not just on the battlefield, but as the result of narrative decisions. I lost one of my sergeants in a tragic training accident before we even shipped out, seemingly to teach me a lesson about how vulnerable any named soldier is.

Squads in combat are a bit more abstract, though. They don't actually have a set number of guys in them that can be killed. That goes for both you and the enemy. Rather, each has a morale score that can be lowered temporarily by battlefield conditions like suppressing fire, or for the rest of the mission in the form of "casualties." These can be replaced between missions, assuming your higher-ups can be convinced that you need reinforcement.

This ties into one of the most interesting ways Burden of Command sets itself apart as a tactical game. Generally, a squad cannot be killed just by shooting at it. To remove an enemy from the map entirely, you have to assault their position and force a surrender. This requires you to first lay down suppressing fire on them, which both prevents them from shooting at your assault squads as they approach and increases the chances the assault will be successful.

So the tempo of a battle very much follows a move-and-fire doctrine, where you have to scout out an enemy position, suppress it, then ideally flank it and go in for the assault. Your own squads, likewise, might take a lot of casualties and end up pinned down. But they won't generally be completely wiped out. You'll simply run out the turns allowed to you to finish the mission and have to accept a more dire narrative result.

Each map also has two different objectives for "Mission" and "Men." Mission is how quickly and effectively you completed the tasks the brass gave you, which earns you Prestige to use in leveling up your officers. Men is a measure of how well you treated your soldiers on the mission, primarily by minimizing casualties. This earns you Loyalty, which is used to level up your squads.

Getting high marks in both, I found, is usually easier than focusing on one or the other, since securing objectives in a timely and effective manner naturally lends itself to not taking a bunch of unnecessary losses, and vice-versa. But occasionally you will be forced to prioritize.

This all adds up to a war story that seems to be extremely branching and adaptable. I'm not sure exactly how adaptable yet, because I've only seen one path and the single auto-save and inability to restart a mission means you can't just go back and try a different choice. But based on the minute things I have seen Burden of Command react to, I'm very interested in finding out just how much the scenario might diverge if I called my shots very differently.

It really is that rare breed: a wargame for roleplayers. And while it may have me agonizing over every decision I make, that's exactly how I like it.

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

Sometimes I buy obscure old games for what I like to imagine are grand, noble reasons. A niche developer makes an unusual puzzley twist on the RPG, and I must learn more. A great idea turns up 20 years too early on hardware that could barely run it, and I just have to know if it works anyway. An ancient dungeon crawler dares to combine horror with extensive map-making, and I need to see it for myself.

And then there are times like this, where I see the words "Initial D typing game" and just know it's going to be so daft I have to experience its particular brand of absurdity with my own eyes.

No setting could be more unsuited to the typing game treatment—not even Sega's The Typing of the Dead felt as forced as this. The '90s street racing manga and anime adaptation of Initial D are full of achingly cool people driving hyper-tuned cars I will never see outside of old arcade games and Tokyo Xtreme Racer. It's about as effortlessly stylish as anything could ever hope to be. Which means it's also on the exact opposite end of the cool spectrum as "accurate touch typing" and "being the sort of person interested enough in typing games to have them shipped from the other side of the planet." (Hi).

I expected to have nothing more than a bit of a laugh with 2000's Initial D: Ryosuke Takahashi's Fastest Typing Theory, to confirm it was a silly idea and a fun curio for my shelf I'd soon put away forever. A brief run through practice mode quickly corrected my casual attitude. This game is as deadly serious about the typing tutor part of the package as it is showing off nighttime drifting around hairpin corners.

There are separate sessions for each hand, colour coding to show correct finger placement and their corresponding keys, and a full dual-handed test too. When I'm done I'm shown my clear time, tracked to the hundredth of a second, as well as how many slip-ups I made and my five most commonly fumbled keys. I've been judged in three specific areas, none of them drifting a tuner Toyota Trueno, and found deeply wanting.

Seeing my weaknesses laid out in this way wounded my writer's pride. I type all day and night. I've worn keyboards out, haphazardly stuck them back together, and then typed some more. So when some decades-old game has the gall to tell me I'm anything less than amazing at the one thing I do all the damned time, you bet I'm going to take it personally.

I think Ryosuke Takahashi's Fastest Typing Theory did this on purpose. I took my white-hot umbrage and poured it into the main "Battle" mode, ready to unleash my lightning-fast reflexes against the game's five opponents, unaware that I was so wounded by its mild accusations I was about to dedicate an entire afternoon to showing an ancient piece of typing software who's boss.

Rather than try to meaningfully integrate the races with my frenzied keyboard mashing, these sprints instead follow a video > typing > video > typing pattern, the compressed action pausing in certain places to allow for some burning hot key pressing action.

The short and low resolution clips used to sell each "race" aren't exactly up to modern technical standards, but as they're all directly lifted from the '98 TV series Initial D: First Stage (as is the fabulous Eurobeat soundtrack and numerous snatches of dialogue), they're still enough to drum up some genuine excitement. Watching another one is my reward for typing well, and I'm soon caught up in clearing the latest word off the screen, always afraid I'll take a second too long or fumble too many keystrokes, every error chipping away at my health bar until I crash out.

At first I assumed the text I'm asked to type out would lean towards racing/car terminology in a vague attempt to justify the licence, so I was surprised to see the Japanese names of countries, rivers, and short words that would translate into "periodic table", "shampoo", and "hamster" turn up instead.

Weird, but nothing I couldn't handle. I was doing pretty well in no time at all, actually. My typos were down, my speed up, and my initials were plastered all over the game's arcade-like high score table. I soon had a string of breezy victories to my name and confidently clicked on the next race without giving it much thought.

It felt as though the game had suddenly slammed the accelerator to the floor. By the end of the fifth stage I'm desperately typing out full sentences, sometimes with punctuation, and swearing like I'm facing the final boss of a soulslike. No more single words to quickly clear away for me. Oh no, now the challenges demand perfect inputs like "AREHAHASIRIKONNDEKO-SUWOYOKUSITTERURAINNDAYO" and "ITUMADENETEYAGARU.OKIRO,DENNWADA."—and that's if I'm lucky.

I've had less stressful hospital appointments.

Just as it's on the verge of becoming truly unbearable the game throws out something that could be translated as "Count Dracula can't handle the sun" just for fun. I end up swearing again, only this time it's because I'm trying to focus on typing accurately without laughing my head off.

Against all odds, this is a genuinely useful typing tutor. The practice sessions are of real practical use, and the Initial D framework makes it all feel more like play than real homework even when things get tough. The lack of any true link between these two seemingly incompatible halves turns out to be for the best, the unpredictable text forcing my eyes to focus on the screen and trusting my fingers to do the rest. I am a better touch-typist for playing this, and I got to see some great '90s drifting, too. I'm not sure if my freshly honed skills will transfer to Tokyo Xtreme Racer, but I'm still counting them as a win.

Few names can terrify classic Doom fans more than Okuplok, an obscure mapper who's only surfaced a few times on the Doomworld forums, usually to release something painful before slinking off into the shadows. They're best known for unleashing one of the most nightmarish levels in the history of Doom upon the world: The humble-sounding 'untitled2', better known to the community as the 'Okuplok Slaughter Map', is one of the most gruelling combat challenges in Doom history—a colossal series of arena battles against an ungodly 23,211 demons where even the tiniest mistake spells instant death.

The map has always been beatable. With sufficient quicksaves, or the slow-motion inhuman precision of a tool-assisted speedrun, it was always theoretically possible to ascend this mountain of demon corpses. But to do it without dying? Without saves? And without leaving a single monster alive? That's the real challenge. And for thirteen years, players have thrown themselves into this meat-grinder, aiming to be the first to record themselves clearing it under the community's standard UV-Max challenge rules.

In a gruelling six hour struggle on Easter Sunday, pro Doomer 'Coincident' finally did it, and I watched it happen live. Check out the recording of the record-breaking run here, but before you dive into that, check out the video above for a brief introduction of the hell that is to come, and why even surviving the first few seconds of this map is a challenge that only a rare hero can handle.

Coincident has been fighting tooth and nail against Okuplok's creation for some time now. Two years ago, he managed a one-life run on Doom's lowest difficulty. This evens the odds somewhat, halving the damage done to the player and doubling the contents of every ammo pick-up but leaving enemy placements otherwise unchanged. Even with those advantages, it's a challenge very few could overcome, especially as the sheer volume of oncoming fire means that even with twice the health and ammo, you can still die in a blink of an eye.

Unsatisfied with that partial victory, Coincident set out to surgically dissect the level, developing new strategies to make a true Ultra Violence difficulty run possible. He even went so far as to publish a whole series of videos picking apart its individual encounters and devising the most survivable approaches to get through it. A useful aid, but without patience and precision, it still won't get you very far.

Due to the highly random and unpredictable nature of Doom's combat (including some enemies capable of doing absurd damage with a single hit if the game's under-the-hood damage dice decide you deserve to suffer), any successful run is going to be a mixture of endurance, precision and luck, and you can hear the stress and tension in Coincident's voice as he ventures deeper and deeper into the map. All that tension comes unraveled and replaced by adrenaline-drenched catharsis as he brings down the final artillery emplacement of Arch-vile snipers in the final arena. It was six hours of the highest-level Doom gameplay ever recorded, and a feat that will be remembered in the community for years.

So, Nightmare mode next, right?

Fans of Twister rejoice, there's finally a game that lets you take down tornadoes in the least realistic way possible—and it's free!

Kill the Twister, a free indie game that's exactly what it sounds like, launched on Steam this month and you don't even need to add it to your wishlist since it's a free game at the time of writing. In this "self-contained FPS boss fight against a massive tornado," you take on the role of "the Weatherman," who's job apparently includes physical confrontations with the weather.

While Kill the Twister is short at just 30 minutes, it has plenty of replay value since the gameplay is focused on mastering its snappy movement system. There are also different difficulty settings if you're looking for more (or less) of a challenge from your twister foe.

Combat requires deftly dodging flying debris while tossing explosives and trying to shoot down the tornado (but don't worry, you can take a break in the office between runs).

It's also worth noting that Kill the Twister won't kill your PC because it's super lightweight, requiring just 200MB of storage and only 2GB of RAM.

I went ahead and tried out Kill the Twister myself and it lives up to the advertising—you kill a tornado with barrels and a gun (or, more often, die trying). The graphics remind me of an old-school horror game, but that adds to the charm. As goofy as the premise is, the combat is satisfyingly challenging, especially figuring out how to navigate between flying chunks of debris to get to more crates and barrels.

If you want a quick, fun, and relatively mindless FPS game to jump into, Kill the Twister is worth trying out. I wish it had co-op so I could shoot at tornadoes with my friends, but you can't really complain when it's a free game.