Radio Commander

I think this is a game that for those liking the overall concept and ideas will be very enjoyable. For anyone not interested in mentally keeping track of things and simply moving counters around on a map, not so much.

While listening to panicked screams of our soldiers, profanities, demands for support and evacuation or reports about casualties, we can really get the feeling of sitting right in the middle of the war chaos. And also – the crushing feeling of being unable to help. [12/2019, p.82]

Refreshing idea: you are asked to take control over your troops, but you have no direct control; developers want you to feel in the middle of the action, but they remove you from it. Brilliant on paper, but players remain prisoners of the limitation the game designers set for themselves, leaving us with shallow combat and unnecessarily too little feedback from what's going on in the battlefield.

A brilliant, almost revolutionary idea that got lost amidst Vietnamese rice fields. The roleplay is excellent and you will feel like a real general… But the strategic simulation is bland and, frankly, quite boring.

Radio Commander is brought down heavily by an identity crisis in its core game design and inherent tedium and repetition.

Radio Commander is a solid novelty, but it's unlikely to be a truly memorable experience for those who pick it up.

An ok game with good replay factor, but very simple in its mechanics. In a good promotion it is worth testing this game.

Monotonous game with monotonous gameplay, which consists in combing certain areas in search of the enemy. The concept is interesting, but the implementation...

Tl;dr: Cool idea, bad execution. This is too bad, as I was really looking forward to this one. Pros: Decent visuals. Map and menus are nice. Panning around the base is cool. Mission intro videos are nice. I enjoyed the non-important banter with your units. Cons: There's a ton, but let's skip to the important one: gameplay is boring. Ask where a guy is. Make sure they're still fighting. Fast-forward. Repeat. Super boring and repetitive. The radio aspect just masks an inherently shallow strategy game where nothing matters more than just constantly sending all of your guys to overwhelm the single enemy. Also just repeatedly call in artillery and helos. There's just no heart to this; it feels brain-dead and boring. The voice-acting is super stilted. You can obviously tell when they're playing the next audio clip, and this is SUPER apparent when they report status (which is what you're doing 70% of the time). Summary: They put no thought or effort into the gameplay. Yup you talk to your guys over the radio, but this just masks an incredibly shallow experience. Look elsewhere for your realism itch.