Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus Special Edition

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4.3/5

( 41 Reviews )

4.3

41 Reviews

English & 3 more

Overall most helpful review

Posted on: August 6, 2009

igor8472

Verified owner

Games: 106 Reviews: 11

Harder and faster...

I knew that this game eventually will b avaiable on GOG and here it is :-). For me as big fan of ground control purchasing of this title is just formality' already done... Game for sure is harder and 'faster' then Ground Control 1. It's good that this time there isn't any base building and resource gathering too. Tactics is most important. In GC 1 you had mission objectives to complete, one at the time, Operation Exodus focuses instead is on acquiring and holding (i.e. camping) Victory Points, which generate Acquisition Points (i.e. currency) automatically, and Landing Zones, which enable you to shuttle in troops using the game's drop-ship.. Battle is more rapid and little more chaotic from the one in previous Massive game and it's in some way simillar to World in Conflict. You'll never have downtime, but it's extremely challenging to balance throwing units into the field with the amount of micro-management each of the units requires. Every unit in Ground Control II is extremely specialized, and some quite powerful ones, if left unattended, will just die without reacting to their attacker. The single-player campaign, thankfully, helps ease you along the steep learning curve nice 'n' slow, and even throws in a couple more intimate 'stealth'-style missions to help you get to know your individual units? strengths and secondary abilities better. It even has a pretty neat story, replete with twists and turns. Graphics and sound were very good alread in Ground Control 1 and now are even better. Have I to say more? You know GC series, you will buy this game anyway. Every fan of non base-builidng RTS's should buy it!

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Posted on: August 11, 2009

darth_careful

Verified owner

Games: 526 Reviews: 9

Not an orc in sight

It's easy to forget just how revolutionary the GC series was. Playing through GC2 again, I was struck by just how mainstream it is. Everything's here: polished presentation, great graphics, gameplay inspired more by online skirmishes than C&C-style base attrition, a full 3D camera, story-driven campaign, relentless action. Even by today's standards, it's hard to fault; maybe the camera is a little less responsive than I'd like, but I'm nit-picking here. It's a superb game. Perhaps the greatest recommendation is that the gameplay 'innovations' that made Dawn of War and Company of Heroes so addictive appeared in GC2 first. But there's not an orc in sight, and for that I'm truly grateful.

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Posted on: August 14, 2009

zigfried77

Games: 4 Reviews: 5

Fast and enjoyable!

Ground Control II is very enjoyable. Despite having to baby-sit your troops, and play with the same objective over and over, the game still had me coming back for more. Action is fast, more like in current strategies. Ground Control 1 was more tactical. With no base building and no resources to harvest, the focus of the strategy on troop movement and placement is streamlined to provide gamers with action oriented gameplay. The game’s graphics are beyond gorgeous, and the single player campaign is engaging. While not a perfect game, it is good, and deserves a chance from any real time strategy fan.

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Posted on: March 2, 2011

plasticvet

Games: 44 Reviews: 18

This Kid is Allright

...though not as awesome as its elder sibling. Here you have a bit better graphics, a bit more complex story, complete with an evil empire and a rag-tag resistance force, intense action with piles of dead bodies and heaps of broken metal, yet... something is missing. Gone is what made GC1 truly special, the pre-mission guessing game of customizing your units. Gone as well is the fear of turning around the corner and walking into an ambush. Gone is the fear of losing your experienced units, that frantic scramble to retreat your one last smoking tank behind your lines. Now you have control points, and you always order new units - and your units do not keep experience between missions. No longer can you have a killer crew and load it into either an artillery vehicle or a rocket-launching terradyne, whatever suits the mission most - experience is lost, units are always new and most of them are replaceable during the mission - if you capture enough strategic locations and thus gain enough points. It still plays ok, and it hooked me enough to finish it, but surely it came nowhere near the original. Sometimes, the action is thrilling, when you are throwing more and more units at the enemy, but the poise of the original is no longer there. No way could you take your units and just rush the enemy in GC1 without scouting - many maps, you would get vaporized in cross-fire as soon as you said "charge", you needed planning, scouting, and guts to go for the kill in the opportune moment. Fulfilling objectives was never enough, you needed your squads to survive, or the odds stacked against you throughout the length of the campaigns. This is no longer there. GC2 is much closer to just another RTS - chuck out units, kill A with B and B with C, rinse and repeat, leave the dead and wounded behind. Story, visuals, and sounds are very good tho, and well above the standard of the day. If you like RTS, I´d give it a shot - there is nothing basically wrong with the gameplay here, and I recall it with some fondness. The screenshots here, incidentally, do not do the atmosphere justice - the real feel of the game is much, much above that.

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Posted on: August 6, 2009

sundermk2

Verified owner

Games: 213 Reviews: 13

Fun, but frustrating

I was a big fan of the first ground control game, and years later the announcement of a follow up had me excited to go drop off at the game shop. First and foremost, this is not more of the same. Gone is the old slow pace and careful movement and strategy, gone is the idea that you have what you take in and that's it. This time you get to hold control points, and holding control points gives you resource points which can be used to call down reenforcements on the fly, not to mention a big drop ship with a couple huge cannons on it. The story picks up hundreds of years after the first, and the connection is almost limited to the name only. Still what you get is well done even if a bit predictable. Voice acting is actually pretty good, and some of the characters are quite interesting. The game starts out smoothly, and even perhaps the difficulty stays a little low till you hit the second half of the game where you take over a new faction. Here is where the trouble begins. You're faced with a confusing structure of merging units that slows you down right when you need to be running full speed as the difficulty finally ratchets up at a high pace. Perhaps I would have gotten used to the units, may have even beat the game if I hadn't lost my cd case along with the key in one of my many moves. Every now and then I come across the disk again and wonder what happened in the rest of the story. For six bucks, this isn't a mistake. Though include the extra $40 in vodka I'll want to make it through the second campaign...

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Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus Special Edition

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