Star Wars Force Commander (PC Game)
Reviewed by Brian Schell
This is one of the longest awaited games I can think of- It's been completely redesigned and retooled several times since it was originally announced. I saw the first preview of this game about the time StarCraft came out roughly 2 years ago! It was originally planned to be a top-down real-time strategy game graphically designed to compete with StarCraft, but that was lost in the various rewrites and now looks more like a cross between Myth and Warzone 2100.
The concept is simple; you play both as Imperial and Rebel sides during the original Star Wars movie trilogy. This time the focus is from a ground combat standpoint. You play as Stormtroopers, AT-ATs, AT-STs, Dewback riders, speeder bikers and more on the Empire's side and on rebel side, you get airspeeders, troopers, infiltrators, Y-wings and hovertanks as well as other units.
The training missions are pretty easy, and take you though the Imperial viewpoint of tracking down the droids on Tatooine in the original Star Wars movie. There aren't any resources to mine- to create new buildings and fighting units, you spend command points. These command points are assigned depending on your performance, much like the prestige point system used in the Panzer General series of games. The actual combat is pretty simple- select a bunch of your units and click on the enemy to attack. The trouble is finding the enemy- or sometimes even finding your own troops who are under attack.
The primary problem with this game is the camera control. When something happens in the game you are invariably facing the wrong way. There are so many commands to learn just to make the camera work that you spend more time moving the screen around than you do fighting. These third person real time strategy games just don't work well for me. I definitely prefer the "old-fashioned" standard top-down approach.
All the cut-scenes and storylines consist of computer generated actors and sets; there are no live actors. There are several recognizable names in the voice credits, including David Warner, Raphael Sbarge, Michael Bell, Keith Szarabajka and other names you may actually have heard of before. They aren't exactly James Earl Jones or Mark Hamill, but it's not the guy from the accounting department doing bad voice acting, either.
Taking that into consideration, the graphics are quite good and the missions and storyline are well thought out. The story works -with- the events in the movies rather than trying to re-enact them. If you can get the hang of the myriad required camera options, it's a decent addition to the Star Wars universe.
Star Wars Fleet Commander
For more info: http://www.lucasarts.com
Requires: 266MHz, 64MB Ram, 450 MB HD, Direct X7.0 Compatible Sound & Graphics card.
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