![]() You swap which weapons you’re using by clicking the right mouse button, a task usually assigned to the scroll wheel. The weapon swapping controls are also completely mental. Obviously, the left mouse button is, in this instance, being used to fire your weapon, but why the E and Space controls couldn’t be swapped to perform the functions that make more sense for them is a complete mystery. You jump with the E key and select where you want your units to go to with the space bar, again allowing the space bar to fullfil the role of the left mouse button. However, this is where the good use of combat controls falls apart. When you take control of a vehicle, or when you’re wandering around outside in your own little red space suit, you move with WASD and look/shoot with the mouse in a startlingly apt use of modern gaming controls. ![]() The real breakdown is the completely clunky mess which is the FPS portion of the game. Regardless of the strange decisions, the RTS aspects of this game at least act like an RTS you can build units and buildings and pretty much tell your soldiers what to do. Having the Space bar act like the left click of the mouse instead of letting the mouse do its job is a bit of an interesting decision, to say the least. On the RTS side of things the game works well enough, although the control scheme is still bonkers. Then after a while, you are given access to a computer that provides you with a birds-eye-view of the situation, and it’s at this point the game becomes the fabled ‘FPS-RTS’ hybrid that everyone has been talking about. For the first couple of missions, you follow around your superior officer in several different vehicles shooting random aliens and trying to learn how to command on the fly. When you start the game out, you’re basically locked into the FPS only side of the gameplay. Admittedly, there are very few, if any, other RTS-FPS games out there, so it could be argued that there are no standardized controls, but honestly, any game that carries the ‘FPS’ tag but doesn’t have any sort of sensitivity settings can go and die in the biggest of fires. ![]() The biggest issue that comes with this remake is the fact that game controls have become pretty much standardized since the late 90s, as well as gaming itself having come a long way since then. The developers were in no way trying to reinvent the game, they were simply trying to remake the 1999 sequel game without the bugs and to satiate the fans of the hyper specific genre. So now it’s been a decade or two since the last two games came out, and a new set of devs have decided to take a crack at the hybrid RTS-FPS formula to see if they can reinvent it, something they’ve actually managed to totally fail at doing. The sequel, Battlezone II: Combat Commander, came out a year later, and was poorly received by the series’ insular fan-base due to poor multiplayer and a butt-load of bugs. In the late 90s, it was remade as a game for Windows featuring more advanced graphics and gameplay, which admittedly wasn’t hard as a late 90s wristwatch could have better graphics than an early 80s arcade cabinet. The original Battlezone was an arcade game from the early 80s that used vector graphics to convey a first-person tank battle simulation. ![]() ![]() One of the worst forms of nostalgia comes from properties which were so obscure and niche that the fans of said property have no choice but to become vitriolic defenders of the only thing which scratches their very specific itches. It can by the driving force behind games getting their funding, it can be the entire reason a game is even made, and of course, it can cause more blindness than mysterious barrels in the beginning of terrible Marvel movies. ![]()
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