Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Set in an alternate timeline where Cold War-era US and Russia have joined together in the face of an alien threat, Battlezone: Combat Commander sees the newly formed ISDF head out to colonize the solar system. As Cooke, a rookie pilot, you’re on the front lines when a new menace called the Scion appear. The story doesn’t matter too much in these games but it’s certainly neat, despite being told almost entirely in text-based mission briefings and very rarely in cutscenes or the game itself. The Battlezone series tried to create a new genre called “Action Strategy”, basically an RTS but where you control a unit on the ground, and still feel unique today since the genre hasn’t really been capitalized on. Cooke commands either a Scout craft or a Tank and can get into action-packed shootouts with Scion directly, but also can order other units to follow him, give them orders, and eventually to build a base, defend it, and create an army like in RTS games. It really is all quite cool, especially as you can even get out of your vehicle at any time and explore the world like a first-person shooter. Done right this could’ve been the greatest game ever, especially after correcting the mistakes (mostly around difficulty) of the previous Battlezone, and it’s certainly worth your time – but a number of irritations hold it back, and Rebellion couldn’t sort them out with a remaster since they’re part of the original game.For one, Battlezone 2 really throws the player in the deep end without enough information. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

There’s no tutorial since you would’ve been expected to read the manual, but the odd thing is that the game takes great pains to introduce you to certain things and ease you into the base-building stuff… then it forgets to tell you important stuff, like how to get ammo, how to repair buildings, and if your vehicle gets destroyed what the heck do you do next? Die, usually. Almost all the time you’re left to figure out how things work, or what does what, or – whoops, that’s a shame, a Scion tank snuck by and annihilated the base while that menu was open. Even ignoring that, Battlezone is still tough and the Scion give no quarter. And then there are the controls. The developer, who if Wikipedia are correct were actually Star Wars Battlefront and Mercenaries creators Pandemic, did a fairly good job of giving players full RTS and Action Shooter game controls while making things as easy to use as possible – which is to say, not very at all. It’s certainly possible to get used to them, but having to traverse multiple menus trying to work out where the Turrets are to build, while Scion are shooting the place up (there are no pause commands), made us long for a regular RTS where we can just click on it. We’d honestly much rather have less options than a confusing crapton of them. And then maybe that Tank wouldn’t have strayed into the firing line of that turret.Then again, we can’t think of another game that offers this kind of variety. Battlezone 2 missions vary wildly in objectives and things to do. Attacking bases with Mortar Bikes

Players must build and manage a base to produce units

Escorting a Mobile Recycler over an unstable ice field, rescuing a fellow pilot while the AI mounts an assault, investigating ruins, being stripped of a vehicle and forced to avoid Scion forces on foot, and all that before we even mention building an entire base and army and leading a full assault on a Scion base. Missions in Battlezone 2 are never boring and every level feels different from the last. PC games in the nineties were insanely creative, weird, interesting, and often very difficult to get running properly without the latest hardware. Combat Commander initially starts out as a relatively pedestrian shooter affair. In the introductory missions to the game, the mechanics are slowly doled out as the narrative progresses. Initially you will deal with a few minor firefights, learn how to get out of your vehicle and look at nav maps, and how to control other units in your ranks with the simple hotkey based command system. This is not a separate tutorial; this is simply how the game plays out until you are eventually familiar with all of its functionality, and it doesn’t hold your hand at all. You are still expected to succeed and complete your objectives, and the mission will end if you fail. It’s a game from a different era to be certain, but I personally prefer this method of familiarizing players because it doesn’t feel like a separate, artificial task needs to take place before you are enjoying the game. And what a game it is. There are numerous things that annoy me about it, to start. Alan Wake Collector’s Edition

Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

The first-person, out-of-tank shooting is cumbersome and frustrating. It lacks the fluidity of an FPS game, making it feel like you are stuck up in another, clunkier vehicle type. It is necessary to save your ass if your tank gets blown to bits, and allows you the time necessary to hop into something better, as well as maneuver through tighter spaces on the occasions where that is necessary, but it simply feels bad and I couldn’t wait to get into the cockpit of something every single time I had to go on foot. The A.I. is troublesome and often stupid, causing units to sometimes have trouble getting where you send them in an efficient manner which often resulted in unnecessary unit losses. And there are bugs — quite a few bugs, one or two which caused me either major setbacks, or losing a mission entirely. Not much fun when that happened, but it wasn’t very often.The game works like this; after the first half of the game, which slowly unlocks the mechanics piece by piece, you typically start with a few basic units, set up a base, start mining resources, and complete mission objectives while attempting to build up your army and defend yourself from attacking threats. It was a pretty novel concept back in the day, although an earlier game called Uprising: Join or Die by Cyclone Studios actually did the exact same thing a year earlier. I remember being blown away by the prospect of getting into one of the units on the battlefield and being part of the action.

Research new technologies, and defend against enemy attacks

Today, and especially after playing Combat Commander, I have figured out why that mechanic doesn’t necessarily always work, and is a lot more interesting in theory than in practice. For one, it’s cumbersome. You have a ton of different, not always logically laid out hotkeys that need to be remembered. You need to refer to a minimap and larger navigation map while also trying to maneuver your own unit around the battlefield, so it can be hard to understand at any given time what is going on spatially. Early on it’s not bad, but once you start commanding tons of units at the same time, things can get a little arduous. Having complete control makes you feel like a badass commander, but personally speaking, I feel like you never get the sense of complete control over the battlefield that you would in a traditional top down RTS, and that was occasionally hard to deal with. Battlezone is at its best in combat situations. The way your vehicles move and fire and the various weapons at your disposal are all extremely satisfying. Firefights are tough, tense affairs, and the dynamic terrain makes for some interesting battlefields which lend meaning to some of the less direct weapons such as mortars. Whenever I was in a tank blowing up enemies, I was having a blast with the game. I’ll be honest; I’m a simple man. That’s usually enough for me. So having other things to do in the meantime was just icing on the cake, even if there was a bit too much icing sometimes and I just wanted to scrape it off and eat the damn cake. Alan Wake Remastered PS5 

Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

There is a multiplayer mode and a mod section that is tied to Steam Workshop, two things that should greatly please fans. Deathmatch and Strategy seemed to be the two most popular game modes being played at the time, although there are others such as Capture the Flag. With the large amount of single player missions, and offline skirmish modes available, I thought there was more than enough content to please socially-inept curmudgeons like me who don’t even own an acceptable headset and prefer to stay offline, but there seems to be a dedicated little multiplayer community if that’s your thing. The graphics, sound, and interface are all representative of a game from 1999 remastered. Most units are fairly unique looking and easy to identify thanks to some decent art direction. Voice acting is basic but effective, and fits perfectly with the by-the-numbers narrative. Calling this an HD remaster is apt, but may be misleading to some; many of the assets are nothing more than a straight across translation. There is a trend happening where these remasters are looking like less and less work is being put into them that I have heard some people complaining about, but I think most of the time works just fine. Part of a game’s charm to me can often be preserving the aesthetic of it from back when it was originally developed, but if you are looking to buy it, you should be aware that this is hardly much of an overhaul and does nothing to hide its origin of being a late nineties PC game.

Players must gather resources, such as metal and energy

Inserted by a drop ship, the first mission is spent driving around the lifeless planet with the huge starry sky above. A few brief encounters with an unknown enemy set a good tone of mystery for the whole affair. Atmosphere-wise, it helps pull people into the story fairly well. The negative of this, though, is a majority of early missions are very slow, punctuated by periods of very quick combat. Very often it is simply driving around the empty planets, and while cool at first, it starts to become boring. In-between waiting for waves of enemies, there is not much to do. It definitely feels like a ’90s title in this regard, compared to modern gameplay, which seems hyperactive by comparison The actual combat works, but there is not much depth to it. In general, players will be piloting hovercraft or walkers and doing battle with various alien forces. The combat is basically a simple FPS affair, such as Goldeneye. The weapons range from shotguns, lasers, mini-guns, mortars and so on; there is a variety in them, but only a few are actually good. Furthermore, the controls work, but barely; very often combat is simple strafing while firing at the enemy. One of the major annoyances in that combat is very ‘bursty’ in that an encounter often ends with either very little damage or outright destruction. The way the graphics work when shooting and taking hits, the explosions block nearly the whole screen, which makes it hard to continue firing, and certain enemies can do tremendous damage in a very short period of time. Alan Wake Remastered Switch NSP 

Battlezone Combat Commander Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

In other encounters, the enemies seem to not have their aiming correct and you can pound mercilessly. The missions typically are only 20-30 minutes, but it is very frustrating losing near the end because of the fast damage from a random enemy. Strategy-wise, it is pretty barebones. The player has a base they set up, then various remote mining locations they can set up. From there, they can build various units, like fast scouts, or heavier tanks. The remote locations of mining bring a fun dynamic of wanting more of them, but having a hard time defending them. The mix of aspects is novel (relatively, given its 20 year age) but neither of them particularly shine. They are just average across the board. The strategy never gets that intense, and the shooting is just average. Still, though, the game is mostly carried by its narrative of trying to understand what is happening with the political intrigue and unknown alien force. Remember that period in the Nineties, when you couldn’t move for space simulators and various forms of sci-fi combat in PC games? I mean, you had stuff like the X-Wing games and their sequels/spin-offs, Wing Commander had numerous entries and then there were the more niche titles like Terra Nova and Battlezone. They all had a very similar look and feel, as they strived to find that military style, as if realism was somehow linked to fighting aliens and robots from space. Remember those big tiger dudes, the Kilrathi, in Wing Commander? Yep, realism. Furries in space.

Seriously though, the period was stuffed full of games with that same style, probably due to the boom in combat flight simulators at the time. Battlezone however, tried something a little different as it combined direct combat with some real-time strategy elements. The 1998 PC original was recently remastered by Rebellion and, apparently it was popular enough for the 1999 sequel to also receive the ‘redux’ treatment, in the form of Battlezone: Combat Commander. While the ‘98 original centred around an alternate version of the ‘space race’ in which the US and Russia fought over some precious alien metal, the remastered sequel sees both nations teaming up to face a new threat from another world. This largely seems to consist of standing around while trained fighter pilots watch each other get shot to smithereens, thanks to the original introduction movie you’ll be treated to when booting up the game. I mean, it hasn’t even been enhanced in any way, even appearing in a tiny box in the centre of the screen because its original resolution was so low compared to today’s standards. Luckily, the main game’s visuals have been upgraded in a major way, which makes that intro movie all the more jarring. Still, when you enter your first mission, the lighting and shadows are fantastic. The planet textures and bases look a little dreary, but they’re still incredibly detailed and their dark colours help to make the vibrant reds and greens pop against the blacks and greys around them.

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: Battlezone Combat Commander