Commentaries :
Bongoboy, Splash Damage designer explains:

«Our Oasis map ended up having relatively little connection to World War II, even though we thought it was going to! There were so many battles in North Africa in WWII involving a wide variety of combatants and materiel: French, British, Italian, German and American. As you suspected, we were very interested in the battles for Tobruk. At one point we were going to make a whole map based on the historical defence of Tobruk but it never developed past the concept stage.
We wanted to make the maps as different from each other as possible so we wanted to make Siwa was just such an amazing location, with such great potential for gameplay; it was more use to us as a scenario location than places where there really were big WWII battles.
Siwa has an amazing history, and could be the subject of a whole game on its own. There really is an Oasis there, as well as an archaeological excavation of an ancient temple.
The dig site in the map is a combination of several different Egyptian archaeological sites, particularly the temple of Karnak at Luxor, Egypt.
The little railway and carts were our homage to the dig site scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, although nobody seemed to recognise them.
The Old City was constructed from several different sources, but primarily from Shali, the actual old town of Siwa.
The Axis base was a fusion of several influences and references, especially the movie Laurence of Arabia. The layout was more inspired by the Axis base in MP_FuelDump than any historical structure. Certainly there is no recorded instance of anti-tank guns being mounted high up in a fortress.».


Gorobei of Real-ET delivers its opinion:
A very good map that takes up again the principle of commandos by making it playable: an attack on the less defended side to break the enemy defence. Of course, the anti-tank guns of the game are way too high and make good targets. Most of the time, the guns were usually buried. An oasis is actually made of dry mud and rocks. There is not much left of it after an aerial bombing. I especially like the reference to Lawrence of Arabia, one of my favourite movies as its main actor: Peter O’Toole.