By: Rorschach
just a short time ago.
There are ostensibly four resources (extract, iron, carbon, and
titanium), but all of them come out of a single hole in the ground.
In fact, the only indications of resources are gray areas on the
radar screen, and you can't tell what resource is under there until
you try and build a mine. If you start to set up a base in an area,
and the local gray areas are short of one resource or another,
you're best off relocated and trying again. There is an unofficial
fifth resource - people - and this is really the only intriguing thing
this game adds to the RTS formula. You build a power plant, and
it takes people to run it. You build a vehicle factory, and it takes
people to run that. You build an academy, and you have to have
people to train to become soldiers. The key is that you only have
so many people to do all these jobs. You build habitats (hives for
the aliens) and they support a certain birth rate and provide a
place for a certain number of people to live (if you click on the
habitat you hear the disturbing sounds of babies crying, yeeeh).
This turns out to really be the key resource because as you're
cranking out units and building structures you can very easily find
yourself running short of people. To help in a people shortfall, you
can control the number of people working in individual structures.
You can, for example, reduce the number of people working in a
power plant at the cost of reducing the total power produced by
that plant, or you can put fewer people to work in the vehicle
factory, and it takes longer for that factory to build a unit. It's a
neat difference, but not enough to carry the whole game.
Graphically this game looks almost exactly like Command and
Conquer. No fooling! It supports higher resolutions, but overall
the units are tiny and indistinct. There are two sides to this combat
- human and alien - but they both have the same general units and
buildings, and really color is the only way to distinguish your
soldiers from theirs in combat. Your soldiers are tiny guys in red
jackets. Your commandos are tiny guys in jackets that are a
slightly brighter red. Whose plan was that? Here's a nifty bit: your
units are blue and his are red on the radar, but on the battle map
yours are red and his are green. Unattractive and confusing! Little
flashes of muzzle fire from your tiny, tiny troops; little blips of the
bullets impacting their targets. The sounds appear to have been
ripped largely from the C&C soundtrack. When a building is
destroyed, the entire screen shakes (presumably from the
enormous magnitude of the explosion). That was fun for about
1/40th of a second.
So what would possess someone to release a game just like C&C
roughly 5 years after C&C passed vogue? They had a gimmick.
They actually had two gimmicks. The first gimmick is that the
world in M:H is a globe. That means you can leave the bottom of
the battlefield, and enter at the top. Similarly with the left and the
right. It brings an extra dynamic to defending a base because the
enemy can come from any direction - you don't have the luxury of
sticking your base in the corner of the map to minimize your
defensive perimeter (Ooh, military terms. Sexy!). And to the credit
of the guys behind M:H, it is a strategy that the enemy AI takes
advantage of often. However, you can usually take advantage of
terrain features (cliffs, ridgelines, and such) to largely negate this
effect. Also, if I were fighting in, say, Montana, against Canada,
would I expect them to travel up over the Arctic Circle, down
across Russia, past Antarctica, through South America, and then
come up on me from behind? Probably not. The reason that the
square battlefield model works is because, yes the world is a
globe, but the world is a very large globe. The worlds of M:H are
apparently about the size of a basketball. One of the most bizarre
results of this is that when units get hung up at a narrow pass, the
aforementioned pathfinding problem will cause them to find
another way around, and that other way around is sometimes all
the way around the world! It's really strange to be involved in
some battle and see a few lone straggler units of yours wander up
behind the enemy.
The second gimmick is that you are fighting a sort of continuous
battle across a solar system, and if you conquer a planet and then
move on to the next one, the enemy can come back and attack
that planet you left again. In reality if you take the time to pick the
planet absolutely clean of resources before you leave for the next
one, when the enemy shows up again he won't have anything to
work with and you'll be flush with resources. The only problem is
that doing this takes forever, and makes the game even more of a
burden and less of a game than is already is. At the end of a
mission - once you've conquered a planet - you load up your
mother ship with resources and colonists (no military units) and go
on to the next planet to start again. You can go back and check on
other planets if you like, but you can't do much while you are there
- the ability to build new structures is apparently contained within
your mother ship.
Last night while playing the game I came across an endgame that
totally pissed me off. I had completely wiped out the enemy,
except for one guy. Where was that one guy? I didn't know. If
this had happened in a game like Warlords: Battlecry (and it has), I
would set my troops to berserk mode, and they would fan out
looking for the last guy automatically. I could go read a book or
something while they hunted down the last dog. But there are no
aggressiveness levels for me to set in M:H, and I've got to walk the
troops all over the frigging planet, probably took me 25 minutes, to
find this schmuck and off him. Definitely not the taste you want to
leave in my mouth the day before I'm writing your review.
Rating: 49%
Written By: Rorschach
Game Over Online - http://www.game-over.com
This could well be the greatest RTS game ever. That's just what
they would be thinking in the sweatshops of EON Digital, if only it
was 1995. Lemme check my calendar here. Ummm, Dilbert tells
me it's 2001. Sorry, EON Digital. Sometimes a game comes along
that is such a total anachronism in terms of graphics, sounds,
gameplay, and every other facet that you're wondering if it was
written years ago and only now hit the newsstands, or if the
programmers did the programming on computers that were 5
years out of date. This is such a game. It adds nearly nothing to
the RTS genre as it stood way back when C&C was released.
There is so much out of date in this game that I could fill an entire
column discussing it. Hey! There's an idea. While reading this
review, you might want to keep in mind that I felt that Tiberian
Sun was essentially a relic from 1995 as well. If you feel
differently, if you feel TS brought new and different things to the
RTS genre, then you're likely to disagree with this review as well.
M:H has no unit formations, no unit aggressiveness levels for you
to set, no waypoint patrol system at all. You can't even set your
units to guard anything. Units in general are dumb as dirt. If the
enemy is nearby, they will attack automatically, but this nearby
effect has a very clear circle of influence. If the enemy
approaches a group of soldiers standing around, only those within
that circle will attack, while the rest stand around with their
you-know-whats up their you-know-where. I moved a group of
soldiers nearby the enemy barracks, and they started shooting at it
automatically. Swell. Then an enemy soldier comes out of the
barracks, and mows down 4 of my guys before they realize they
should stop shooting at the building and start shooting at the guy
that is shooting at them. A group of enemy units is shooting at one
of my buildings, and units on the other side of that building don't
respond to it. Units being shot at by the enemy at range, say a guy
firing rockets, will stand around until they are completely and
totally dead - they will make no move whatsoever to either escape
from or attack the unit that is bombing them into oblivion. You
want pathfinding problems? Mission: Humanity has them in
spades. Units get caught on each other, rocks, trees, and other
terrain features. Sometimes they just give up and stop, and
sometimes, like when units pile up at a narrow pass, they try and
find another way around, wandering far away from the rest of their
division. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that battles take
place pretty quickly in this game. You've got to kind of
micromanage your troops (move the riflemen forward where they
can do some damage rather than just being target practice for the
rocket guys, get your rocket guys knocking out his rocket guys, etc)
if you want to use your troops to their best advantage. The
computer is better at maneuvering these tiny guys around than you
are at grabbing and moving them with the mouse, especially with
your guys bumping into each other and the rocks. And if you're
home building a power plant or whatever and not watching your
troops, the enemy can sneak in and wipe them out pretty quickly.
I haven't had these kinds of problems with an RTS in some time.
All of these problems are highlighted in comparison to the
excellent Warlords: Battlecry that I reviewed just a short time ago.
There are ostensibly four resources (extract, iron, carbon, and
titanium), but all of them come out of a single hole in the ground.
In fact, the only indications of resources are gray areas on the
radar screen, and you can't tell what resource is under there until
you try and build a mine. If you start to set up a base in an area,
and the local gray areas are short of one resource or another,
you're best off relocated and trying again. There is an unofficial
fifth resource - people - and this is really the only intriguing thing
this game adds to the RTS formula. You build a power plant, and
it takes people to run it. You build a vehicle factory, and it takes
people to run that. You build an academy, and you have to have
people to train to become soldiers. The key is that you only have
so many people to do all these jobs. You build habitats (hives for
the aliens) and they support a certain birth rate and provide a
place for a certain number of people to live (if you click on the
habitat you hear the disturbing sounds of babies crying, yeeeh).
This turns out to really be the key resource because as you're
cranking out units and building structures you can very easily find
yourself running short of people. To help in a people shortfall, you
can control the number of people working in individual structures.
You can, for example, reduce the number of people working in a
power plant at the cost of reducing the total power produced by
that plant, or you can put fewer people to work in the vehicle
factory, and it takes longer for that factory to build a unit. It's a
neat difference, but not enough to carry the whole game.
Graphically this game looks almost exactly like Command and
Conquer. No fooling! It supports higher resolutions, but overall
the units are tiny and indistinct. There are two sides to this combat
- human and alien - but they both have the same general units and
buildings, and really color is the only way to distinguish your
soldiers from theirs in combat. Your soldiers are tiny guys in red
jackets. Your commandos are tiny guys in jackets that are a
slightly brighter red. Whose plan was that? Here's a nifty bit: your
units are blue and his are red on the radar, but on the battle map
yours are red and his are green. Unattractive and confusing! Little
flashes of muzzle fire from your tiny, tiny troops; little blips of the
bullets impacting their targets. The sounds appear to have been
ripped largely from the C&C soundtrack. When a building is
destroyed, the entire screen shakes (presumably from the
enormous magnitude of the explosion). That was fun for about
1/40th of a second.
So what would possess someone to release a game just like C&C
roughly 5 years after C&C passed vogue? They had a gimmick.
They actually had two gimmicks. The first gimmick is that the
world in M:H is a globe. That means you can leave the bottom of
the battlefield, and enter at the top. Similarly with the left and the
right. It brings an extra dynamic to defending a base because the
enemy can come from any direction - you don't have the luxury of
sticking your base in the corner of the map to minimize your
defensive perimeter (Ooh, military terms. Sexy!). And to the credit
of the guys behind M:H, it is a strategy that the enemy AI takes
advantage of often. However, you can usually take advantage of
terrain features (cliffs, ridgelines, and such) to largely negate this
effect. Also, if I were fighting in, say, Montana, against Canada,
would I expect them to travel up over the Arctic Circle, down
across Russia, past Antarctica, through South America, and then
come up on me from behind? Probably not. The reason that the
square battlefield model works is because, yes the world is a
globe, but the world is a very large globe. The worlds of M:H are
apparently about the size of a basketball. One of the most bizarre
results of this is that when units get hung up at a narrow pass, the
aforementioned pathfinding problem will cause them to find
another way around, and that other way around is sometimes all
the way around the world! It's really strange to be involved in
some battle and see a few lone straggler units of yours wander up
behind the enemy.
The second gimmick is that you are fighting a sort of continuous
battle across a solar system, and if you conquer a planet and then
move on to the next one, the enemy can come back and attack
that planet you left again. In reality if you take the time to pick the
planet absolutely clean of resources before you leave for the next
one, when the enemy shows up again he won't have anything to
work with and you'll be flush with resources. The only problem is
that doing this takes forever, and makes the game even more of a
burden and less of a game than is already is. At the end of a
mission - once you've conquered a planet - you load up your
mother ship with resources and colonists (no military units) and go
on to the next planet to start again. You can go back and check on
other planets if you like, but you can't do much while you are there
- the ability to build new structures is apparently contained within
your mother ship.
Last night while playing the game I came across an endgame that
totally pissed me off. I had completely wiped out the enemy,
except for one guy. Where was that one guy? I didn't know. If
this had happened in a game like Warlords: Battlecry (and it has), I
would set my troops to berserk mode, and they would fan out
looking for the last guy automatically. I could go read a book or
something while they hunted down the last dog. But there are no
aggressiveness levels for me to set in M:H, and I've got to walk the
troops all over the frigging planet, probably took me 25 minutes, to
find this schmuck and off him. Definitely not the taste you want to
leave in my mouth the day before I'm writing your review.
[ 24/50 ] Gameplay [ 04/10 ] Graphics [ 03/10 ] Sounds [ 03/10 ] Plotline [ 06/10 ] Controls [ 09/10 ] Bugs
See the Game Over Online Rating System
|