Warzone 2100

Review

by Nick Smith

Although Warzone 2100 is very much of the Command & Conquer genre, and hence is a strategy game in heavy camouflage make-up rather than an original idea, the game breaks new ground.

The scenario is a familiar one; society has destroyed itself in 2085, and fifteen years later your mission is to lead a team behind enemy lines in the post-holocaust wastelands that are left. You must construct a base, weapons, tanks, gunships and even cyborgs with the resources that you can gather. And then, with your army of mechanized warriors and a production line producing state-of-the-art military equipment, you must conquer more land, control more resources, build up your forces and eventually wipe your enemies off the face of the scorched earth.

Standard battle fare so far? Maybe, but Warzone 2100 is far more than your average war strategy game. Not only is its range of technology and weapons unsurpassed, with its facilities for constructing your very own Terminator-type cyborgs and up to 2,200 other combat units, but its graphic touches are inspired. The small animated units are better looking than those in, say, Command & Conquer, and the battle landscapes are colorful and well textured.

The jaw-dropping difference with this game however is in its use of a very clever control interface which lets you see the action in a floating camera style. The powerful 3D graphics engine enables you to manipulate the action and send the camera view hurtling across terrain to pick up on what your units are doing on the other side of the battlefield.

Not only is the action great to look at, but the features available to the player are also more plentiful than most games in the genre. And Warzone 2100 also accommodates multi-player gaming, with up to eight players competing over a network in a fight to the death.

The brilliant interface, true 3D action and imagination spent on designing the technology available to the player make this game a "must see" and then a "must have."