I can still remember playing Return Fire
on my friends 3DO, the game was one of the most
original idealistic games. Now the sequel can't
even live up to my expectations of the original.
This game was definitely the worst use of my 3dFx
card ever. Glide is one of my favorite APIs utilized in games today, but unfortunately none of its outstanding features were present.
As I attempted to play split screen
multiplayer right before I spent five minutes trying
to figure out how to go to the next level after
capturing the flag, I knew that the games controls
were not the only fault in it's creation. Along with
poor controls, old school [looking] graphics were a
few other things wrong. My biggest pet-peeve in a
game is when you die. You can't start as your next
character, with the same life or whatever straight
away. You have to watch some lame ass movie or
some crappy animations. The 3d skull was about
the worst animation I have ever witnessed, I was
left in shock as my tank burned on the asphalt.
Without the option of changing controls,
using any controller type other than the keyboard
was made impossible. I tried playing with the MS
Sidewinder Gamepad, Nascar force feedback
steering wheel, and with the Gravis Gamepad.
Neither controllers even gave me a decent chance
at the game, this was one of the greatest downfalls
I experienced.
Sure this game is going in the right
direction with huge room for promotions medals
and other spoils of war, but no matter how hard I
try I can't imagine how long it would take before
you could actually get even half of them. I usually
like playing games with a military chain of
command, but this was an exception. Although
this could apply to any game with a chain of
command I pose a quick question, what the hell is
the "General Of the Army" or a Colonel doing
driving around in a tank? They should be at their
desk covering up conspiracies and so forth.
With only a couple unoriginal game
types to play multiplayer, it was not even remotely
fun nor was it interesting in any way. For some
reason I'm just getting tired of capture the flag and
"kill everything that moves" variants, I just hope
the next strategy/action game is actually original.
The screeching of tires and lame
explosions are the extent of the "Intense Sounds
and Music". I just can't stand it when a game's
feature list lets me down. The lack of full-fledged
surround sound and lack of speech made this
game not fun to listen to ,and I was forced to play
an mp3 in the background to try and make up for
it.
The artificial intelligence of this game is
atrocious. The enemy tanks will actually drive off
into the ocean if you fire some flanking shots at
them. They don't cover their base, they don't
attack you base, and the don't even come looking
to attack you! They just drive around until they
see one of your vehicles then start firing.
I have to admit that the amount of
multiplayer options and configurations are nice,
but the programmers forgot to include settings like
mouse sensitivity and key-map configuration which
makes the game as un-customizable as the
console version. And again the multiplayer is not
bad playing with 4 people on a LAN, it was fun but
the game got as old and repetitive as the original
did in about the same amount of time. Every single
multiplayer format I can think of is included even
good over serial and split screen. The almost zero
lag game gave me a chill, but the fact that it's not
exactly the most complex game in the world, I
partially expected that there wouldn't be much lag.
I have a few ideas for a couple of things
could and should be included into this game. A
really cool thing would be to be able to design your
own levels, this would allow you to create levels
that you and your friends could navigate around
easily and also allow you to use all the cool
vehicles like the hovercraft device. Also real time
speech exchange is a must in a game where you
play one on one most of the time. If it is not
included the game can get incredibly annoying and
extremely repetitive.
Though overall the graphics are three or
four-year-old technology, the models and textures
on the actual vehicles are pretty amazing. Paired
up with the loading sequence when your vehicle
leaves the base, these are the only two graphical
elements that I felt we even meet the standard of
today's gaming. With most games using glide to
their full advantage (QUAKE2 in particular) this is
at the lower end of the possible graphic
advantages.
I'm pretty sure that even if you get RF2
and like it you, will drop it by the end of the week
for another strategy/action game with a lot more
intense gameplay. Sure this game is fun, but fun
isn't the entire measure of a game it has to live up
to a lot more or almost every game on the planet
would receive a 91% for being fun.
In short if you loved the original get this
and be disappointed, if you hated the original get it
and mock how bad its Sequel is. If you never
played the original crawl out of the rock you were
hiding under and I would not suggest grabbing this
baby for gaming content only for sentimental
reasons. As with most game sequels, the ideas
and fun are now either too played out or now just
unoriginal, therefore the second game is either not
as fun or not fun at all.
Everything old is new again. This game
is basically COMBAT from the Atari 2600,
converted for today's hardware. You have your
base and an enemy base - either computer or
human controlled if playing over LAN, Internet, etc.
You can choose from various vehicles depending
on the stage you choose. There are tanks, mobile
rocket launchers, helicopters, jeeps, jets, and
boats. You choose one and then assault the enemy
base from whatever direction you feel is the best.
Ammunition is limited so you have to be careful
what you shoot at. You can also return a vehicle at
any time to your base and get another. I'm not
sure if returning to base reloads your vehicle but it
probably does. There are two dispatch areas, the
air craft carrier and the land base. The flying
vehicles and the boats are of course released from
the air craft carrier. To return a plane to base you
merely fly to the flight deck and cut your throttle to
zero - neat.
Return Fire 2 supports D3D, Glide (3dfx)
and software rendering. I ran it in Glide of course
and it was smooth except for the occasional slight
pause. The graphics are clean but a little plain.
They are clean though, unlike some games which
are fancier overall but sometimes have ugly
glitches here and there like obvious texture seams
or improperly alpha blended textures. The terrain
is a little bit blurrier than most current games but it
didn't bother me too much. One thing that was
really good was how buildings exploded. Instead of
just disappearing under a cloud of smoke or
sinking into the ground, buildings actually crumble
into chunks of debris as they explode - other
games like Urban Assault and Wargames could
learn a lesson here. Weapon effects are fairly dull
without any of the exciting effects that we see in
games like G-Police, Longbow 2 or others. There is
no dynamic lighting either which could have made
this game look really cool. The vehicles themselves
are fairly detailed but only to an "arcade" level of
quality.
The sound didn't really blow me away
though. You'd expect an earth shaking rumble
when you destroy a building or military installment
but all you really get is a mild boom sound. I've got
the speakers to play back a nice boom, so give me
it! Game developers are really playing it safe when
they create their sound effects these days, Quake
2 had those wimpy machine guns that went pop!
pop! And NFS3 Demo had another set of drab
engine revving noises. Assault my ears for once
with guns that shatter the silence and engines that
really growl. Same goes for you, Return Fire 2. The
game doesn't have any speech either, when the
enemy attacks certain parts of your base, I would
have liked to hear audible warnings from a
computer voice.
Is Return Fire 2 more or less fun than
Combat for Atari 2600? Well, I recall playing
Combat for countless hours. RF2 certainly has
better graphics but that's it, the game is basically
the same. You versus 1 other opponent, best shot
wins. Although it doesn't feel like the best shooter
wins because the computer vehicles seem to have
more armor. What takes 5 shots to kill your tank,
won't for example blow up the enemy tank. Unfair.
The menu interface is something that really
annoyed me in this game. Nothing is labeled,
instead they use not-so clever icons to represent
the button function. Problem is, the icons don't
really make sense, so to find out what the hell the
button does, you are forced to wait for the
mouseover text to pop-up that describes what the
damn button is for. Luckily Win95 isn't designed
quite this badly. The graphics are good enough for
today's requirements I believe, but they don't push
the envelope. If the graphics aren't the highlight as
in a game like Unreal, then that means the
gameplay or some other feature has to take up the
slack. Return Fire 2 is actually too hard, I played
several different maps but found myself getting
rocked by the computer even at the lower difficulty
settings. I didn't put it all the way down to easy but
the game shouldn't have been that hard at the
setting I used. RF2 is fun to play and it's unlike
most of the other games around, but it didn't
knock my socks off. With a bit of tweaking this
game could have been a real winner, but I would
have to just call this a small victory in an otherwise
losing campaign.
Good stuff:
Clean graphics
Good game design
Some nice touches
Multiplayer support
Bad stuff:
Not a cutting edge product - the little details do
matter
Drab sound effects