Cannon Fodder

Cannon Fodder is a 1993 action game with squad tactics, made by the British studio Sensible Software for the Amiga and ported to many other machines. You command a squad of up to eight soldiers, seen from far above, through missions in jungles, snow and deserts. You click where they should go and where they should shoot, and they do it, all in real time.

The squad can be split into up to three groups, and grenades and rockets are scarce. Every soldier has a name. Before each mission, new recruits queue up in front of a hill, and the hill is covered in gravestones, one for each soldier you have lost so far.

It is short, fast and funny, with a theme song called War Has Never Been So Much Fun, and it is also one of the bleakest anti-war statements in games. The grave hill makes every loss visible, and the cheerful tone around it is the point.

As a tactics game it is simple: it is closer to an action game than to anything else in this library. Its controls and pace are of the early 1990s.

Cannon Fodder shares Commandos' small squad in real time and the habit of splitting it up. Where Commandos asks you to avoid fighting, Cannon Fodder is all fighting. It is here because it made real-time squad control simple and showed that a game could mourn its soldiers by name.