Overall most helpful review

Posted on: May 15, 2016

CowabungaKid

Games: 135 Reviews: 4

May at some point become a good game.

What Petroglyph has put out here is what I would consider a good foundation for an old school RTS in the style of C&C (no surprise there, they have some of the old Westwood people on the team). The problem is with the word "foundation". Because that's it, and nothing more. It's just enough to escape the demo verdict, but not by much. Nothing left of the cheesy but iconic FMVs and dialogues from the old C&C games, no memorable characters (actually, NO characters whatsoever). There is one single faction, and it's about as generic and bland as it could possibly be. From the people who designed Mammoth tanks, Tesla coils, Obelisks of Light and the Hand of Nod, I expect more than this, a LOT more. This is clearly not a finished product, and the fact that Petroglyph decided to release it in its current stage is worrying to me, because the only reason to release in such a state is if you need a cash injection RIGHT NOW. So...with all this being said, why does it still get three stars? Well, the mechanics are solid, there are a couple of quality of life improvements compared to the classic C&C titles, Frank Klepacki's soundtrack is good (although that's hardly worth mentioning, that's like mentioning that the tide will continue to go in and out) and I dearly, dearly hope that they make something worthwhile out of this in the future. But at a time when you can just download OpenRA for free, I can't really recommend spending money on this. Not yet, anyway - unfortunately.

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Posted on: June 13, 2020

kokos00

Verified owner

Games: 106 Reviews: 1

Not DRM free

The game is ok. I bought the whole 8-bit set to play it on the LAN with my family. The design of the factions is too simplistic with no unit upgrade possibilities. It's ok for children but not worth the full price. Even 26$ for all 3 games seems overpriced and I probably wouldn't buy it again. The rating further downgrades that there is a DRM in place which disallows to play the coop campaign on the LAN.

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Posted on: April 23, 2016

fisk0

Verified owner

Games: 1799 Reviews: 5

A great foundation for a 1995 style RTS.

This is a neat little RTS by Petroglyph, which was founded in large part by former Westwood employees - the company that popularized the RTS genre as we know it. It's fast paced, easy to learn and sticks close to the original Command and Conquer formula, focused heavily in base building and were all your construction options are listed in a sidebar. The game only has one faction, which I suppose could be a turn-off for some. I don't mind it, even think the three faction model popularized by StarCraft became too much of a trope in itself, but I guess my personal sweetspot is C&C's and Total Annihilation's two faction model. There's a tech tree for your buildings and units, which like in the old C&C games is based on pre-requisites rather than upgrades (as Blizzard's games tended to handle it) - which for example means you have to have built barracks in order to build the vehicle factory, and in order to get the more advanced vehicles you also need to construct a radar station. The game also features music by the legendary Frank Klepacki and doens't disappoint. Oh, let's get to some aspects I wasn't a huge fan of. I wish there were cutscenss, and there's of course the odd title, "8-bit Armies", despite there being nothing particularly 8-bit inspired by this. The music is in Klepacki's "rocktronica" style, the art is cublistic á la Minecraft and there are some retro game memes thrown into the UI, but nothing stands out as much of an homage to the 8-bit era of games. The art style in particular gets the job done, and it is easy to tell different unit types etc. apart, but is a far cry from Westwood's voxel masterpieces Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 or for that matter the 16-bit classic Dune II. I would've appreciated 1992 style sprites over what we got here, but the generic art is easy to look past. This is a fun RTS I'd recommend to anybody who enjoyed the C&C and Dune style games of the mid 90's, and the launch price point is pretty much perfect for what the game is.

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Posted on: April 22, 2016

LiqMat

Games: Reviews: 44

A Winner Is You!

Command & Conquer meets the SNES. Need I say more? It comes complete with a chip music(ish) soundtrack, NES style sound effects and some bad English translation verses to boot. I took a star off because I am forced to install GOG Galaxy to use any of the multiplayer features otherwise those options are greyed out in the menu. I also found it strange my troops were standing neck deep in lava in the mouth of a volcano and no damage comes to them. So maybe in later builds have the environment interact more with your units? That would be cool. The game runs butter smooth at max detail on my lower mid-range gaming laptop (3610QM, 670M, 16GB) and the interface is very straightforward. You can tell the dev took a lot of time to polish up this title. I love the 8-bit blood from the troops. As far as gameplay it really is your standard C&C style RTS as far as I can tell so far which is not a bad thing. I do like the different difficulty settings that give you different objectives like timed objectives and limited resources. Overall a fun RTS, but a few more features and detail would make this great.

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Posted on: July 1, 2018

BitViking

Verified owner

Games: 800 Reviews: 16

Oversimplified C&C

Has a base for a good game in terms of the game engine but unfortuantely the developers decided to not utilise it. Gameplay is incredibly simple and repetitive and the tech tree is a joke. Winner is always decided by who is able to swarm the other players first. No tactics needed at all. I wonder if people comparing this to C&C has played any C&C game at all. Every game in that series is waaaay better than this. Go play openRA instead.

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