| So I'm walkin through Best Buy and I see this game that PC Gamer gave a 90-some
% to right? It's marked at only 10 bucs. Well why not buy it? That was some
of the best-spent money ever, and I still play this 3-year-old game. Battlezone
is a new kind of game where not only do you sit in a cool hovertank (ahh the
memories of HAVOC I have), but you also command a base of operations,
structures, resource-gatherers, wingmen, launch supplies, deffensive turrets and
nav beacons. The sheer magnitude of the focus required to keep track of everything
with only 2 hands and 10% of your brain while still maintaining a
strict reighn on your basic bodily funcions could boggle Einstein. That, of cource,
is the fun; trying to survive yourself while defending a certain unit from attack so as not to lose the scenario and restocking
your wingmen forms one nifty experience. You are in a first-person view inside a
sofisticated hovertank, with around 30 weapons to choose from and maybe 20
vastly different tanks, from the tiny scouts to massive bombers to the towering
walker-types. Each has 2-4 weapon slots in which to equip (mixed and matched)
5 different classes of weapons. Sound is very good, especially if you have a full 4- or 5-point speaker system. Music is
appropriate and effects come from realistic points. The storyline is an unoriginal, yet suprisinly well-executed
USA vs the Commie Reds type of thing, where the Capitalisets and the Soviets are
in fact already in space with super high-tech vehicles before anyone knew it.
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They have been mining the "bio-metal" deposited by wrecked alien spaceships on
different planets and are fighting over the limited supply. This is the one harvestable
resource in the game, which is picked up by your scavengers and deposited
at your recycler, which is kind of like a command center/town hall from those famous
Blizzard RTSs. The 3 main buildings in your base need power supplied by placing
them over geysers. Bio-metal is used to produce new buildings and units like any
real time strategy's main resource. The single player campaigns are not overly
long, but their diffuculty forces you in a very direct way to try, try again.
The multiplayer is even more fun, as you are pitted against other humans
in either the strategy setting for full-scale warfare, or in that oh-so-nice deathmatch
mode. This is the most revolutionary deathmatch since Descent brought in 360º of
real rotation. This follows the same principle of "look-I-can-do-a-backflip," but
this time you have gravity to compete with and your tank only hovers around a meter
off the ground. You have the option of searching for some random server out there to
play on (I only found one, and that was in Australia), or you can sign up on HEAT.net
for free and have thousands of people to play with. 3D acceleration makes the game
look quite nice, with all its different
tilesets and neat units. Use of W-A-S-D keys for movement and mouse for turning/
aiming/shooting/changing weapons and the space bar and number keys to do just about anything involved
with controling other units make the control scheme quite smooth, once you learn to use
it properly. All in all, this new genre couldn't have had a better starting point.
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