Civilization seems like an ideal fit for mobile phones. An involved but accessible strategy game, which you can dip in and out as you see fit, and eventually rack up a large number of hours worth of game-play from. Perhaps someone would therefore care to explain why instead we're left with what is essentially a elaborate game of Rock, Paper Scissor?

War of Two Cities is somewhat true to its name. You do take part in small scale wars, yes, and there are two sides involved in each battle. But since when were Japan, the USA and Russia cities? Apparently they are, and it may also surprise you to know that these three and their other rival, Rome, are about as close to each other as the average house is to the shops. You can select any one of these to play as, with each having their own advantages and disadvantages in battle.

Each battle sees your chosen city taking on the forces of your opposition. Both sides have a farm, a mine, and the main city, protected by the city walls. In the middle is the border between the two. The farm produces food, which in turn allows you to produce fighting units, be they mobile, infantry or ranged. These will march towards the city borders and, upon reaching there unopposed, start to push them onwards.

As the border is pushed onwards, you can take control of your opposition's farm and mine, thus increasing your Ore and Food production levels. When your Ore level reaches its full amount, you can launch a manually targeted artillery attack on your enemies, which can help to damage the walls or take out their units.

Should your units come into contact with enemy units, a brief battle will commence. Infantry and Mobile units will always defeat Ranged Units, while Mobile will always defeat Infantry. Ranged enemies will attack if they can see enemies nearby, but there's no guarantee that their attacks will be successful. When a set of troops reaches the city walls, they will start bashing away at it until it falls. As soon as a unit reaches the city of their enemies, the battle is won.

After emerging victorious from a battle, you will be able to choose an upgrade from one of three available, in order to strengthen your city for the next fight, and perhaps lessen some of its default weaknesses. This could include speeding up unit movement, or reducing how much it costs to dispatch a particular unit type. Once you've fully vanquished one opponent, you'll move onto the next one, in a brand new era (which provides slightly more modern weaponry, but the same basic game-play).

If the time isn't there to follow through the whole campaign, you can always just enjoy (though that term is used rather loosely) a quick battle, where both your side and the opposition are picked for you at random. There are also three difficulty settings to choose from, Easy, Medium or Hard, with the main difference being that the higher the setting, the more likely is that your opponents will win any confrontations.

The controls are rather simple, with the 1, 2 and 3 keys used to dispatch your artillery, the d-pad letting you scroll back and forth across the (ultimately rather small) battlefield, and the action button controlling the swing meters for your artillery. Sadly, there's a lot of wasted space on the screen too, with most of the area between the city taken up by unused sky. Also, the less said about the fanfare sound that plays with every victory, the better.

Anyone expecting Civilization squeezed down onto their mobile will be extremely disappointed, those that weren't won't be quite as much so, but they'll be disappointed nonetheless.

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