Ever since the days of playing Command & Conquer on the Playstation, and Starcraft on the PC I have been addicted to the Real Time Strategy genre. These days, however, I am too busy to sit down in front of my computer and play a good long drawn out battle…and besides – ever since those RTS glory days the number of good, solid and highly playable RTS games has fallen and given way to ridiculously over graphical monsters.
On the Zodiac, however, there is a different story. The limited hardware means that fully 3D RTS games are difficult and essentially pointless, so we have regressed back to the good ole days with the likes of Warfare Incorporated.
I love Warfare Incorporated, it embodies everything a good RTS game should be. It is the single most played game on my Zodiac and I will explain why.
I mentioned Command & Conquer above, back then when the Playstation was the games console I used to sit for hours on end playing skirmish maps so I naturally have a touch of nostalgia here. Actually, it was Red Alert which I played most and Red Alert is what sprung to mind when I first started playing Warfare Inc.
Like Red Alert, Warfare Inc. has a “pick and place” building style, only your buildings are constructed after you place them. This means you need not bother with construction units so one unnecessary complication in most modern RTS games has been stripped away. Power stations must be constructed to support your base, again drawing from the Command & Conquer series, and an underpowered base is an inactive one – this presents a strategic target when attacking enemies, striking at their power stations will knock their defences offline and seriously slow their unit production.
Your base is constructed using the equivalent to a C&C ‘construction yard’, only Warfare Inc. calls it a ‘Dominion’. At the start of most missions you are given the freedom to place your base where you wish and may even need to strategically place your Dominion within an existing base to provide reinforcements. From this single Dominion you can build, amongst other things, power stations, human resource centres, and galaxite processors. Which lead me to introduce yet another similarity with the Command & Conquer series. Your sole source of resources is ‘Glaxite’ which you are employed to mine from planets throughout the galaxy, the Galaxite and the machines which mine it are almost identical to the C&C equivalent.
You can also build research centres, defences and surveillance centres as the game progresses, creating a type of learning curve most RTS players will be familiar with. This makes the game very easy to pick up and play but still allows it to open up new strategic possibilities and keep you interested as you play through the missions. You can queue units for production and build multiple troop and vehicle buildings to allow you to produce units more quickly.
Warfare Inc. has absolutely excellent graphics, picture a graphically enhanced C&C and you are right on the money. Most buildings are animated and units have idle animations making your bases and armies look alive. The terrain is well drawn and highly varied – you will fight your way across green plains and harsh deserts in a bid to mine Galaxite until your warehouses burst.
The interface is minimalist and makes heavy use of the stylus for selecting and commanding units. The analogue stick affords you 8-way panning around the map, and a mini map keeps you informed of unit positions and lets you jump around the landscape to command your forces more efficiently. It is very easy to play and control and the stylus/digitiser combination could be argued the best way to control any RTS.
If you dig around in the options a little you can enable “lasso selection”, this basically means that instead of drawing a standard square around the group of units you want to select you can draw a lasso to more accurately select the units you want. Double tapping a unit will select all units of its type on screen, and as far as I know there is no limit to the number of units you can select and command at any one time.
The sound effects sound a little low quality (Zodiac specific optimisation and a little less compression could easily fix this), but units and messages are all voice acted. Notifications are given when a unit or structure is completed and your forces will yell acknowledgements at you. The usual C&C-like blipping noise indicates that your money is counting slowly down. There is no music, but you can always set up your Zodiac to play some MP3s in the background.
As well as a single player mission based mode you can play single story missions and challenge missions, which give you specific objectives to complete. There is also a multiplayer mode which I have not had the chance to try out, it offers both Bluetooth and Network multiplay – I got as far as the server list screen, which was promising in itself. I would love to try out multiplayer and if I do you are sure to hear about it.
You could argue Warfare Inc. to be a blatant clone of Command & Conquer, but so what if it is? The developers have brought us a solid RTS and most probably the best currently available for the Zodiac, so clone or not is it definitely a great game for any Zodiac owner and RTS fan and a must have for any fan of the C&C series. The only thing it really misses is a good custom skirmish mode – the thing that kept me playing C&C for so long, but this could easily be seen in a future update.
What’s more – for only $29.99 from the Tapwave site it is an absolute steal. Buy it now and get your Zodiac online. I am waiting to play in multiplayer! PH
