| Battlezone, for those of you who may have
been living under a rock, is a first person real time strategy game ala Uprising. I know what you're
saying, I was saying it too. How can you make a first person real time strategy game without
compromising the strategy? Well, as soon as you sit down with Battle Zone, those concerns totally
and utterly dissapear. |
|
| I met up with the production leader for Battle Zone, Mr. Mike 'revoemag' Arkin. Mike Arkin, I will divulge,
has been a big fan of Area-S over the past few months, so after I gave him the complimentry
autographed loomer picture and loomer action figure, he sat me down in front of a Pentium II 233mhz. I
have yet to mess around much on a P II 233mhz, so this in itself was pretty swank. (I push a pretty
swank P90 at my house!) Anyway, the first thing that loaded up were a bunch of template screens. No
intro movie or nothing yet, just some pretty basic menu layouts. Mike quickly assured me that these
rather unswank screens were just there so we could get to the good stuff. I was kinda fond of these
screens, but alas Mike said they would not make the final cut. The options ahead of me were training
missions, red white and blue, and a soviet campaign. |
|
| The first thing that Mike instructed me to do was load up the tutorial missions. The first tutorial was
basically about moving your vehicle around. I was put inside this massive hover tank, equipped with
some pretty damn snazzy artillery. The first thing I said is, Damn these are some sweet graphics!
That's when Mike told me I was playing the Software version! I couldn't believe it! The graphics were
very smooth, and were very detailed! I was completely shocked! After that initial shock, I got to work on
the tutorial. There were a series of 'flags' that you had to fly through, kinda like a driving test. controlling
your vehicle is much like moving around in Quake. Your best bet is a combination of mouse and
keyboard controls. Anyone familiar with Quake, or any other first person game will get right into it
without very little trouble. |
|
|
| There were a number of special key commands, which I will touch on later. But thats the basic layout;
and along with the mouse, you can move in any direction. The hardest thing to get used to for me, was
the hovering. In the first tutorial it had you spanning these rather large canyons by using the hover up.
Basically what happens, is you can build up speed and stay in the air momentarily hovering about
50-60ft off the ground. You can use this feature to move over the rifts quite easily with some practice. |
|
| Loomer BZ Tip #1 : Get used to using the q key to move fast when you are making the jumps. If you
need to build up speed move back, and retry the jump. Make sure the jump is right or dont attempt it
at all! There are some pretty long falls on the moon! |
|
| The bottom of the screen is where your status bar resides. To the left side of the status bar is what I
would consider the most efficiant mini map ever created. It is a 3d representation of the terrain around
you, and includes everything that is visible in your line of sight (LOS). As you can see in this shot here: |
|
 |
|
| What you cant see in this shot though, is that there are little icons for each unit on the map. So it is
easy to distinguish not only where each unit is, but what type of unit you see on your map! Beat that
any other RTS game! You can see that there are relational positions to get your bearing. The map,
unlike Myth The Fallen Lords, DOES rotate around as you move! |
|
| After becoming familiar with knowing what was on the mini map,
and what the heck I was doing, it was time to move on to Base
Building 101! The second tutorial introduced me to the real meat of
the game. The base building. Basically there are two resources
that are a necessity. There is scrap and power. Power, from what
Mr. Arkin said, was not as important as it was in Dark Reign, but
still very essential. Scrap on the other hand is what you need to
survive! Scrap lies around on the ground in what are lovingly called
scrap fields. You need to have a certain unit, a scavenger, that
goes out and reclaims the scrap and brings it back to your base
for processing in the recycler. Sound complicated? Well , it isn't! I'm sure your thinking, well how can I
create all these units if I'm inside a tank, and I'm off defending my base.. I don't want to travel all the
way back to the base to keep up on base management! Well, you dont! You can access any unit, at
any time, from anywhere and issue them a host of commands. (think Dark Reign...) |
|
| For instance to start off base building you need have your recycler build a
scavenger to get scrap to make more units! You will have a side bar menu,
in which you can access any unit. The recycler is hotkeyed as unit
number 1 I do believe. So what you do is select 1, then select build and
then select the number for the scavenger. Now, your thinking, well that's
fine and good, but how do I get the scavenger over to the damn scrap. I
dont want to have to go and manually move him! Well, again quit being so
damn lazy! Heh, all you have to do is select the scavanger from your list of
units. Once selected, you are given a bunch of tasks that the scavenger
can do. They include follow, go to beacon, collect scrap... etc. All you do
is select collect scrap, and he goes on his merry little way! All this can be
done without ever having to be near your base! What is even more
interesting, is when you get into the combat aspects of the game! Which
brings me to my next phase :Combat. |
|
| I decided to skip any further tutorials. Feeling that I was bad ass enough to go in it now, I started up
one of the Red White and Blue campaigns. The first one I did was on the moon I do believe. I was put
with the task of escorting a recycler over to a geyser and to start collecting scrap. Well I'm like.. how
the hell am I going to be able to protect this recycler... Well again, I called up the recycler on the task
bar menu and I selected it to pack up. Another interesting feature is that you can pack and unpack
your units. Notice in the picture up above, the option 0 to pack up. Once you have packed up you are
presented with a host of new options. There are go to nav (which sends the unit to a specific spot) and
follow. What you have to do is get the recycler to pick up and follow you so that you can easily defend
it from the hordes of nasties that are coming your way. |
|
| I intially decided to forgot my paternal responsiblities to the recyclers and get my first taste of action!
So I left the recycler there and went in search of enemies. It was very quick that I spotted these disc
shaped flying saucers that came at me. I hit the T key to target them, much like mechwarrior. Once
targeted you can start to deal out the death! Let me tell you, the weapons in Battlezone are some of
the kewlest weapons around! My initial tank was loaded with 4 different weapons. A basic AT-Stabber,
which was good for general use; a MAG Cannon which Is pretty straight forward; a thumper device,
which is by far the kewlest weapon I saw! It lets you do terrain modification and kick units up! Just be
wary of your own units! Now, it was time for the real fun to began.... |
|
| --Loomer |
|
