Review

Interestingly, I played Battlezone after playing (or rather, 'sampling') its successor, Battlezone 2. Since I never bothered to write up my impression of Battlezone 2, I'll take the opportunity here to make some comparisons between the two (I also included some BZ2 screenshots). Battlezone is far and away the better game, no question about it. I can commiserate now with all of those gamers (and reviewers) who were so disappointed in the sequel. It's not that Battlezone 2 is any sort of catastrophic failure. In any other universe, it might be easily regarded as a decently entertaining, gorgeous, but flawed game. And there's the rub: anyone who'd played Battlezone had already enjoyed an entertaining, gorgeous (and flawed) game. Unless you'd played Uprising, Battlezone supplied your first taste of blended first-person action and real-time strategy. And it did a damn fine job of it. The flaws came in the form of an interface that was rough around the edges, poor strategic AI, a few irritating game design issues, and some limitations imposed by the technology of the era. None of that kept it from being fun. Here I am, playing it five years after its release, and I had a good time with it.

But here's the point: Battlezone offers up a nice package. Battlezone 2 needed to be better and it simply wasn't. Even worse, it was, well, worse. Instead of taking the rough edges off of the interface, Battlezone 2 sharpened them and created new edges altogether. Here's an example - in Battlezone, creating groups of units is clumsy and cumbersome. It can only be done through the command menu, making it impossible to create groups by visually selecting units. Battlezone 2 "fixes" this by automatically grouping units of the same type. The problem is that this is basically useless. When are you ever going to want all of your tanks to act as one group? One of the cooler aspects of Battlezone's strategy was mixing and matching the capabilities of the different units. Battlezone 2 just totally prevents you from doing this. And this error is even more egregious because Battlezone 2 increased the unit limit. Another example involves the satellite view, or communications view (this is basically your typical overhead, isometric view). In Battlezone, this view was available at any time from anywhere so long as you had a functional comm tower. I literally spent 90% of my time in the satellite view on some of Battlezone's more complicated missions. The interface functioned well enough in this mode that Battlezone actually played better than many of the traditional RTS games I've played. It would have been nice to zoom out further than was allowed, and again the inability to easily group units caused frustration, but it was nonetheless very valuable and in fact one of the only ways to execute larger scale tactics. Unfortunately, instead of improving the usefulness of the satellite view, Battlezone 2 went and rendered it almost utterly useless. For some bizarre reason, Pandemic decided that the satellite view shouldn't be available unless you (your game avatar) physically entered a relay bunker. This totally ruins the unique play experience of Battlezone: the juxtaposition of participating in combat and controlling strategic decisions. In Battlezone 2, I found myself having to choose to play the missions in primarily one mode or the other. I could either go sit in a relay bunker and play commander, or I could stay in my tank and mix it up. This is where Battlezone 2 really failed, as far as I'm concerned. It threw away what made the game so unique. If I just want to play commander, there are better strategy games out there. If I just want action, there are better 3D action games. Battlezone did what none of the others had done, which was let me play both at once. It's the whole peanut butter and chocolate thing.

A third example of how Battlezone compares favorably to its sequel involves the single-player missions, and the map designs. Battlezone had a decent campaign, and in general allowed the player a good dose of freedom in achieving objectives. That's where a lot of the fun came from for me. I really enjoyed being able to roam around planetary terrain, unfettered, in the cool hover vehicles, engaging personally in combat, and using the satellite view for building and long-range unit management. Towards the end of the U.S. campaign (17 missions), unfortunately, things went south for me. Activision pulled a couple of annoying design clichés out of its bag and really turned me off. Towards the end, the enemy consists almost entirely of these new flying units that appear out of nowhere. I hate this. It's a real pet peeve. It's as though the designers can't figure out how to ramp the challenge, so they say, "hey, let's just have shit randomly appear. The player will never know where or when it's going to happen." Yeah, that's fun. While you're at it, why not put me under a time limit? Well, Battlezone does that, too, on some of the missions. I hate timed missions. About the only thing that could be worse would be time limits, randomly appearing enemies, AND JUMPING PUZZLES! The result is that by the end I didn't feel particularly inclined to play the Russian campaign. But the majority of the U.S. campaign was fun. Not ragingly fun, but enjoyable. Now, Battlezone 2, on the other hand, had me totally uninterested in playing after about 5 missions. I stuck with it until I was sure I was past the Learn-How-To-Play phase of the campaign, and when things didn't improve, I quit. The problem is that Battlezone 2 was too contrived and scripted. It's supposed to be a strategy game, but the campaign had me doing totally nonsensical things, like having to trek across land on foot for no good reason. It felt more like a series of tests than a campaign, and it wasn't fun. I also got the sense that the maps were designed so that the player didn't have any freedom. Battlezone 2 has a gorgeous terrain engine, but none of the maps I played were designed to give me the opportunity to explore the way I had done with Battlezone.

Anyway, the short version is that Battlezone is still the best entry in the action/strategy category. It may or may not be your cup of tea. It provides the opportunity to command units, build bases, and be fairly tactical, all while literally being in the thick of things and getting to fight alongside your forces. What it doesn't do, however, is completely solve the problems associated with combining those two kinds of play. The interface is sufficient to prevent its own interference with the fun, but it still leaves a lot of room for improvement. I didn't get to try the multiplayer for Battlezone, but I suspect that is probably where the game really shines. Battlezone 2 is prettier, but that's about it. It gives up a lot of ground in gameplay compared to its predecessor. The issues with unit grouping and the satellite view are enough to keep multiplayer unsatisfying, and the bad campaign missions really scuttled the single-player.