Review for Ground Control II

[schild]

Sucks. Next.

[NiX]

Wow this sucked big. This makes StarCraft look complicated. Select units, wait for them to drop and zerg? Right on the money, schild. Please, don't subject me to try another game like this.

I have to admit the whales jumping out of the water and the birds flying around was cool. Well, up until the point where I realized I couldn't kill them.

[Alluvian]

Thank you for saving me the time it would take to check out the demo.

[Joe]

Lame.
I saw this at last year's E3, and was really excited. Judging by the comments, it hasn't developed much since then. Pity.

[Megrim]

Could you, um, be a bit more specific?

Perhaps a few short paragraphs more like an actual review?

[schild]

We were actually planning on doing a full review. But we played for about half an hour (Nix and I) and it tasted so bad we decided it wasn't worth a review. That should say enough about the game. Like literally they need to go back to the drawing board.

Another crap RTS I fooled around with is Perimeter, now, trust me, when I say Ground Control II was worse than Perimeter it means something is horribly, horribly wrong.

[Megrim]

Well that's a damn shame.. i kinda really like the first one.

But there is a demo out though (i'm not convinced by Nix's comparison to Star, heh)?

 * edit, found the demo, playing now.

[schild]

Here's Penny Arcade's take on GCII.

Ground Control II: I'm pretty much in love with this game. I said just a couple days ago, RTS is not my genre of choice - but this was not always the case. There was an equilibrium point years ago where the ability of processors to render a certain number of units and my own ability to command those units in meaningful ways intersected. Also, outside of aesthetic considerations, I don't particularly enjoy building bases, and as much as I like lumber or whatever collecting it isn't exactly my favorite thing. Oh, and here's something else - units with tons of individual special abilities that must be initiated in real time for them to be useful don't really turn my crank. These aren't problems with the "progress" of the RTS genre so much as they are me trying to make real-time games turn-based. Manipulating hordes of units and their respective payloads is just as much a part of the game as the tactical elements.

Ground Control 2 is, in a word, fresh. I don't mean to imply that the experience is new, rather, I mean to evoke the character of old school hip-hop. The first Ground Control had you moving squads of units and capturing resource collection points, much as in Relic's Dawn of War, but it also had kind of an odd feature - the ability to "drop in," or join dynamically, a live RTS game. It also had some of the coolest graphics of the time. You no longer move as squads in the sequel, which is fine actually, but the other two things are still in there... For the love of God, if you like RTS or are - like myself - something of an apostate as regards the genre, download it. No base building whatsoever. No insane hotkeys to remember, every unit simply has two states which offer different functionality and counters to other units. Excellent graphics, and huge battles you can feel in your gut. And, like Soldiers: Heroes Of World War II, it offers full cooperative play through the game's main campaign. I mean, that's it. Don't gild the lily, guys. I'm sold.

I have been playing skirmishes with a friend against the A.I., also known as The Poor Man's Co-Op, and it has a vice-like grip on my scrotum.

Heh. Well there ya go, other than the part about 'the excellent graphics' and it 'being fresh' and the rest of the other positive stuff, it's pretty spot on. Feh.