As many of us gamers will understand, militaristic shooters are highly popular among the community. Video games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Red Orchestra, Crysis, Halo and Killzone rank as the highest takers of the genre but none of them truly simulate a military training experience. They instead focus on throwing us into a series of explosions and making us feel like we're part of the armed forces.

Reload however, is different. Mastiff games have stripped the experience down, removing the needless lens flares, pristine graphical quality and clichéd story lines to try give us a realistic combat situation. It's a military training simulator basically, with very little to surprise or confuse you throughout.

As far as the single player mode goes, you'll need to play it all the way through before you can play anything on the free shoot mode where you can fool around. You'll be required to get a minimum of a Bronze medal on all twenty-one levels so that you can progress, and this isn't as easy as you'd first think.

Some of the military training exercises suffer from a horrid case of 'drunken aiming', which makes the steady button, also known as the spacebar, an absolute must and this steady meter only functions for three seconds before you have to charge it back again. During the rifle training this is properly infuriating, because just when you think you've got the perfect shot going from target to target your virtual solider will suddenly decide to sway like wheat in a barmy breeze.

This spike in difficulty isn't helped by the fact that some of the other levels are amazingly simple, a great example is the first hostage situations where you blow away the bad guys and score more for, take a guess, avoiding any hostages. That being said, the exercises themselves are actually pretty fun. The variety of well made levels is a nice change from some of the Indie produced shooter based games recently and the textures, while not top notch, make the weapons used look realistic and their animations, well designed.

As expected from any game where guns and targets are involved, the background music features deep, bass ridden guitar riffs that make heavy metal almost sound friendly. But is later drowned out by your faceless, American narrator who calmly orders you to “carry on trooper” or “reload!” in the most dramatic way possible.

The game also features a multi player mode that isn't quite what it seems to be. When given a multiplay option nowadays we assume that we're going to be instantly linked to the hundreds of thousands of players from across the globe. But Reload takes this somewhat literally and gives you a feature that lets multiple players play on the same PC. While it's not a bad feature or that it even lies about what it is, but I would like to have engaged others in some form of exercise online, rather than locally.

In the future, I would like to see some from of proper PvP (player vs player) system in place as I think that Reload could properly benefit in terms of replay value. While trying again and again to get a higher score is, testing your wits against real players is much more fun.

As military training simulators go, it's a fantastic game which actually does simulate pretty accurately what some armed forces do to train for hostile situations, but as a shooter it has a good idea which isn't then fleshed out by other features such as a proper multi player experience or a short campaign.