Battlezone: Combat Commander Review for PC

“Follow me” into the depths of interstellar nostalgia.” For those of you new to the Battlezone: Combat Commander experience, you may be in for a treat! Originally released in ’99 as a sequel to Battlezone, Battlezone II was a well-received continuation of a groundbreaking FPS/RTS hybrid. Big Boat Interactive studios is manning the helm in this entry’s remastered version. Battlezone: Combat Commander is much better looking than its original muse, the graphics are amped up and explosions look nice, the landscape of Pluto and the stars above are at times mesmerizing. The only real issue with a 4k rendering of a game that came out in 1999 is that it is impossible to revamp the graphics without some performance issues arising. First and foremost an engine built on ‘99 technology is incomparable to some of the AAA games we’ve seen in the past two years. As a result, I encountered a number of bugs and failings during my playthorugh of the game.

Battlezone: Combat Commander begins with a simple retrieval mission as an International Space Defense Force (ISDF) soldier piloting a smooth hovering attack plane, called a Scout. Through some pre-mission debriefing the exposition tells us that the United States and Russia are no longer fighting each other, but instead have joined forces to fight off this mysterious Scion alien race. Certain outposts on the planet have been destroyed and supplies have been stolen. You slowly begin to find out why these things are happening through the first few missions. This is where the original release of the game got most of its flack, and it unfortunately carried over into this remastered version. The first 7-10 short missions of the game are tutorial based levels. You follow orders, get told how to use your controls and command only a couple of vehicles and abilities. It isn’t until later in the game that you are able to really dive into the RTS aspect Battlezone: Combat Commander offers by creating armies you can fully control. This alone is quite frustrating. The beginning is too long and boring. On top of this slow pace, there are some annoying bugs that you have to constantly deal with. I found myself helping the commander that I am supposed to follow by ramming into her spaceship to help her pass the invisible rock that was keeping her from showing me the way. Something else I realized is that there are no objective markers when you are supposed to follow a teammate. The box only states, “Follow so and so” which is extremely aggravating when you actually have to help your teammate get there, resulting in a frustrating situation where you may not progress the level on your own. Most frustrating of all is while in a firefight, you may need assistance from your engineer bot, or any of your other utilitarian AI’s. When you call one over for repairs or assistance the AI will take the shortest route to you, often times passing through an active firefight getting itself in trouble instead of choosing a safer path. This is no fault of the remaster, it is merely a problem that the original had as well. I mean, you can’t really be mad at an AI from 19 years ago. I praise them for the effort.

However, there are twists in the campaign beyond the “lets save the earth” trope that I didn’t expect, and even though the voice acting is laughable at times, it still feels janky enough to forget and just enjoy. In Battlezone: Combat Commander, the voice acting is old enough, rugged enough, and silly enough to enjoy in its nostalgic glory. The story holds this game together, and quite frankly it’s the only thing that this remastered version has going for it, as the online community of this edition is nowhere near as cumbersome as its original fan base was.

The game’s RTS mechanics were interesting and refreshing in many ways. It does not have a top/down RTS functionality as its main venue of gameplay, rather the developers created a way to have these RTS mechanics in a 3D world while keeping the enjoyable perks of FPS shooters. With instant drop down menus and hotkeys for each command, the momentum of command is easy to maintain. And truly this is what makes this game a must play. It’s so incredibly nuanced and well done. You have many options to play a mission. Call in some support to distract the enemy, hop into your ship, flank, jump out and now shoot and push to deactivate their Information center.

Multiplayer is a nice distraction from the campaign as well. With a 14-player supportive lobby, you can engage in races, dogfights and many other modes. However it never really dragged me back in and I was usually bored by the end of a match. The only redeeming quality is that the other online players would be doing a better job than both your AI allies and your AI enemies found in the campaign.

Something that brought a lot of players back to Battlezone II was the freedom of modding. There were innumerable amounts of mods made for this game that touched upon graphics, UI revamps, ship enhancements and most amazing of all, custom campaigns with amateur voice acting. The problem now is that the community has lessened, and the game is a bit outdated to have as many modders as the original had. The diehard fans still have some mods which they will add, but there just aren’t as many of them as there were during the games initial release.

Battlzone: Combat Comander is a fun trip down memory lane, a graphically revamped FPS/RTS hybrid that was the first of its kind and for old diehard fans it’s a treat to play it again. But for newcomers and especially for gamers post early 21^st century games it will be hard to adjust to the outdated gameplay and overall aesthetic. If there was a larger community playing it, and more than just cosmetic mods roaming around the internet, then I would say that this game could become a success once again, but after the revolutionary modding that has gone into games such as GTA V, Skyrim, and Minecraft it has nowhere to stand in comparison.

7/10

Here is the Battlezone: Combat Commander Launch Trailer:

Battlezone: Combat Commander is now available for PC on Steam and GOG.

Petros Gourgouris

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I am a recent graduate at Columbia University. I've been an avid gamer my whole life and truly realized the grandeur which video games can achieve when I played Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater on the Playstation 2.

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