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 $40 in vodka I'll want to make it through the second campaign...
This game wasn't exactly a huge hit upon release. It came out at a time when the RTS market was filled and a number of larger name releases were hitting shelves. Those of us who tried it out found something different from the rest of the market. An RTS without ore mining? For those of us who despise the initial 20 minutes of spam basic units as a defense, pile up tons of resources and climb up the tech tree this was a real treat. Plus this added the bonus of (for the time) pretty good pathfinding on top of full 3D terrain where true line of sight became all important (oh those anti tank infantry hiding in little ditches were a *$%^#!). So with your limited supply of units (who if destroyed are replaced, but the units gain xp and perform better if they survive) you engage in the single player campaign. The story is solid, a somewhat cyberpunk dystopia where corporations and religions fight massive wars for control. Now as good as the story is, it is marred by the acting. Let's just say most of the voices are.. unconvincing. If you can ignore that you'll be content. The gameplay is solid, your units don't spend much time lost, actually use the formations you tell them to use (at the time this was amazing), and if you play carefully and tactically you can dominate the battlefield while suffering very few losses of your own. I fondly remember using artillery strikes to lure the enemy into ambushes, and the pain of loosing heavy tanks to infantry with rocket launchers. Good stuff all around. As a final note, yes this game was made available free in advance of the release of ground control 2, but you had to go through a bit of a pain registration process to get a free CD key, and the expansion was not included. In fact the expansion was released quickly, quietly, and can be a major pain to find. I would happily pay GOG's price for the original and the expansion, as a 2 for 1 I'm clicking the purchase button with glee.
Like most gamers immediately upon release of this game I fell in love with the concept. What self respecting FPS gamer couldn't love an ultra realistic shooter? So like everyone else I knew I rushed out and picked up a copy, happy in the knowledge that thousands of reviews were screaming 'most realistic FPS ever'. Indeed, for it's time it was very realistic, as far as bullet damage goes. Multiplayer made the game, single player destroyed it. It seemed no matter how light I was, no matter how carefully I checked corners, how slow I went, or what my team mates were doing terrorists could always whip around 180 degrees and shoot me dead, or at least horribly wound me if I ducked back around the corner fast enough. This experience repeated itself again and again, and lead to my renaming the game to Corner Death Syndrome. Eventually I ran the following test. The map had an airstrip, with an aircraft on the end. On the other end was a shack the player starts behind. Underneath the aircraft facing away from the shack was a terrorist holding an AK-47. Upon peaking around the corner, the terrorist does a sudden 180, and shoots me in the head. Repeated retries resulted in more instant kills, the occasional light wounding, and on a couple unexplainable occasions the terrorist didn't turn around and allowed me to shoot him in the back. After that test, the cd went in the trash, I have never regretted that choice.
