The Game Druid

Oddly enough, the developers chose to stage the war on U.S. soil, a la “Red Dawn.” The game starts with a ridiculous premise. After a shooting war starts in Europe, the Russians supposedly have the guile to hide armies inside cargo ships that storm ashore in Seattle. Now consider that the Russians only have a one port in the Pacific ocean, and it’s an icy one at that. Further consider that the U.S. Navy was a lot bigger than the Russian navy, which consisted mostly of submarines. And then you have to wonder how the Russians managed to fly a lot of planes over Seattle, from half a world away, and land divisions of paratroopers in a complete surprise attack.

OK, I know. The point is the developers wanted to have the action on U.S. soil so that Americans would buy the game. Anyhow, the game starts with a tutorial that has a flare of drama because it has a voice over by a tough drill sergeant. The voice adds a touch of humanity to the game because the vehicles and soldiers you command are sort of like ants. The view of the gamer is so elevated that you don’t get to see your soldiers close up, as with Company of Heroes. The birds-eye view fits with the sweeping landscapes of the game. It also adds realism because modern weaponry enables firefights at very long ranges. With this broad view, you can fit an entire town on a battle map.

The tutorial shows you how to maneuver in 3-D space with 360 degrees of camera control. Pulling that off is always the trickiest problem in a real-time strategy game. You don’t have time to get disoriented in real-time combat. This game does as good a job as any in 3-D going back as far as Homeworld, but it makes the same trade-offs compared to games that used a fixed 3-D view. It’s easy to move your view to the wrong spot of the battle. The tutorial shows you how to get reinforcements onto the battlefield via air drop and how to rain death on the enemy using off-map artillery, air strikes, and missiles. The latter indirect combat adds a great deal of joy and tactics to the game; it’s almost more fun than the direct combat.

After the tutorial, the first mission depicts the invasion of Seattle. You see the story unfold in animated cinematics with reasonably good dialogs and animations. You also see the story narrated via painted still images that also allow you to feel more emotion about the civilian losses as the Russians take over. I give a thumbs up to developers for realizing that this is the way to make a birds-eye view game more emotionally involving.

You start out commanding just a couple of vehicles. Most vehicles have a unique offensive and defensive feature that you can command yourself. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle has a TOW missile that you can use to target individual enemy vehicles. It also can generate smoke to protect itself in a defensive maneuver. Like throwing grenades with soldiers in Company of Heroes, you can spend a lot of time directing your TOW missiles at individual Russian tanks. But if you do that in bigger battles, it takes a lot of precious time and amounts to micro-managing a battle that you really should fight on a higher level. The Seattle streets look pretty good. You can recognize terrain like the waterfront and the freeways, the King Dome and the bridges. Each becomes a key point where you have to fight off the Russians as you stage a strategic retreat.

The Russians move against you with paratroopers, trooper carriers, battle tanks and other vehicles. Their helicopters drop soldiers and vehicles behind you in attempts to flank you. But the artificial intelligence isn’t that good. The Russian vehicles have a tendency to drive right through your own lines, particularly if you cut through their columns. They stop and shoot at point-blank range, which leads to some unbelievable suicidal firefights. (Hey, maybe they’re trained to do that, but it sure isn’t smart play).

But the overall structure of the game is good. Your infantry is vulnerable in the open, but you can send them into buildings. Once inside, they can be deadly to any vehicles or infantry trying to get past them. Anti-tank infantry is particularly good against the Russians. To take them out, it’s best to rain an artillery barrage on the buildings.

A lot of the missions require you to take some ground. You move your forces to occupy a couple of circles at the designated target. Then you have to hang on to it in case of counterattacks. The tanks can be deadly to other vehicles and they can generally withstand more than one TOW attack. One of the flaws of the game is that the vehicles don’t light up when you target them with a TOW, so you can’t tell if you clicked on the vehicle or missed it. It’s easy to miss when the target is moving. You have to waste time clicking two or three times to get your attack right.

The retreat from Seattle leads to a battle where you have to take and then defend a small town in the Northwest. Each leg of taking the town happens piecemeal, in separate missions. But the real fun starts when you have to defend the town against Soviet attack. That’s where you have to line up precisely timed artillery and air attacks. If you do it right, then you get the joy of seeing the Soviet forces go up in a huge bombardment. Dirt flies and smoke clouds rise in the air. Tanks explode in fiery hulks. The environment is entirely destructible, so you can fight over the rubble of buildings and destroyed vehicles.

Ultimately, the battles expand and you get to use your reinforcement points to purchase bigger and bigger things, leading right up to a tactical nuclear weapon. There is a lot that is satifying in this game. But the AI flaws mean that it’s much better to play multiplayer over the Internet against someone who has the brains to fight the right way. Still, this is a highly enjoyable game with enough visual and tactical advances over past RTS games. It’s enough to draw me away from the consoles to the PC, for a short time, during a season of exciting games. And it’s the first PC game this year since Supreme Commander to hold my attention. Well done.

We at The Game Druid give it 8.5/10

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