Cieciu

For a game coming from the designer of Civilization IV and the publisher of the Galactic Civilization series I was expecting... dunno, something more rich in *experience* and not only content. You can see the hard work, but not everything works towards being either interesting or fun...

************************** I come from the cardboard and "pencil and paper" (our way to play miniatures) wargames, so I was very curious about experiencing this genre on my PC. "Harpoon" (which I have in the cardboard version) appeared to be promising, but the Ultimate Edition was a broken mess. For there reasons I had high expectations for "Command". I forked $80 for this game when it came out, only to find on my PC another broken mess. "Command" tries to do too much while, at the same time, even the most basic commands are buried under an incomprehensible user interface. You can determine rules of engagement, EMCON, when to use or not to use weapons; and, most importantly, the overall mission. Then you discover that throttle and altitude are under another menu. And that general route is under another one. In the tutorial you have two squadrons of F-14 whose job is to clear the skies over the objective. So you program them to maintain standoff and blast the enemy they find ***in a specific direction***. You launch your squadrons, and they start to dance "The Blue Danube" by Strauss, without, of course, firing a single missile. Amazing. I devoted maybe 15 hours to "Command", because you just ***feel*** that there is a game under the mess When I started playing computer "Harpoon", for example, I found that the possibility to open different windows to follow different situation at the same time was really cool. So I expected to find the same opportunity here. No joy: you have to follow everything from the same window: even WWIII. The reasons of this horrible design choice are beyond me. Speaking about the map itself, the developers decided to go for a 3D world similar to Google Earth. Cool! Until you realise how jerky is moving around, it doesn't matter how powerful your rig is. I have an i7 with a GeForce GTX980 and an SSD, and it is like playing on an old Pentium 100Mhz. Sometimes I, literally, cannot find a crisis point because the map window, instead of moving smoothly, jumps around. The propaganda says that "on a powerful computer the game will scream". The developers recommend the use of a powerful computer. In my opinion, this requirement is only useful to hide the numerous technical problems. Given the problems with sound too, I'm not even more sure that "Command"'s developers used DirectX, which would be amazing. To close the book, add the random crash, sometimes when you are launching the game! The mess of the UI joined to these technical problems leads to further confusion. Your aircrafts, instead of screaming on the objective and launch their, lets say, anti-radar missiles, again improvise a representation of "Terpsichore" in the Darcey Bussel version, while the SAMs choose "Sarabande" by Haendel (the music from "Barry Lyndon") and wipe out the "Prima Ballerina" wannabes from the sky. Why the anti-radar missiles didn't fire? It's an error I made? Something buried in the UI? A bug? Mystery. I once stumbled into a debate where some bozos tried to explain that "you have to learn it by yourself, by doing research!" and that for this reason "Command" offers the opportunity to be a "learning experience". I do find this not only offensive, but also an excuse to cover for the horrific manual (to the developer's merit, each incremental patch is bringing it to what it should have been in the first place). Anyway, If you don't know who Darcey Bussel is, you can use my review as a "learning" experience... "Command" brings to my mind a strange image: a child who is unable to come into world from the mother's womb because of a series of complications: you see the head, or maybe the feet, but the poor creature is stuck. It is like seeing something which could be good stuck halfway between a potentially interesting game and a turkey because the developers could do/knew only part of their job. Will a better mid-wife arrive to finish the job? We can only hope, but I have bad feeling about the whole situation. Right now my best hope is that another group of developers will learn from the mistakes of this one and finally produce a good modern warfare naval game.