Jedra

This is definitely a 'Marmite' game. You are either going to love it or hate it. Fans of the original Carrier Command will probably enjoy this remake if they jump into the strategy game rather than the campaign. From this point of view the experience is a good one. The campaign is a little strange as they have added an FPS element to 'set the scene'. You can see why they did this, and it also seems like a good idea. Unfortunately the mechanics of the FPS portion are poor by today's standard and not really up to scratch. It is a shame as this is not what the game is about . The strategy elements are what Carrier Command is all about and all the FPS section achieves is to confuse the player as to what genre the game actually is. It is also unfortunate that the FPS segment takes up the first 30 minutes or so of the game, before you actually get your hands on the strategy elements. Having said all this, I enjoyed the strategy elements of the campaign very much indeed. Here you take control of your Carrier which has a complement of 4 Mantas (planes) and 4 Walrus' (tanks). You can give the carrier and the vehicles waypoint orders or you can decide to control it yourself - in reality you'll be doing a mixture of both. Each island is defended by the enemies mantas and walrus' as well as an array of AA and AT guns and laser weilding soldiers. The idea being to take control of the command centre. In most cases it cannot be taken directly, you first have to take down a series of scramblers or other obstacles first to 'unlock' the command centre. The graphics are good with weather effects prominent. Driving you Manta or Walrus is a great feeling and the mechanics feel solid. It took me around 50 hours to complete the campaign. Admittedly it can be done in a lot less time, but I really enjoyed the process of taking each island, trying to perfect my technique for each different island type. There are a couple of well documented problems at the moment... 1. Issuing waypoint orders to the Walrus' (tanks) can be fiddly as the path finding AI often gets confused. This is especially the case when you order 3 Walrus' to 'follow' a lead walrus. I was getting rather frustrated with this until I realised that issuing individual waypoints to the Walrus' alleviated the problem. 2. The enemy carrier can be too easy to destroy. If you do this 'too early' in the campaign then the game sort of ignores that you destroyed it and acts as if it was never damaged at all. This is until the point you are supposed to kill it then all is OK. Both of these issues are being addressed by BI, and will be released in a forthcoming patch. BI are also going to release modding tools for the game, which should help address some of the other gameplay issues. These issues are really game style choices that people have added to a 'wish list' of features. Some of these I expect will be added by BI and some will be modded in by the community. Overall I am scoring this an 8 as I think that it is an excellent strategy game. The campaign is let down by the FPS portions, but you don't have to play this - the real meat is in the strategy game. My score also reflects the fact that the game is moddable which should ensure it's longevity and also some interesting directions in the future.

This is worth the money just for the models and the maps alone - stunning quality. Yes, there are some bugs (the major online bugs have already been fixed) and the campaigns could do with some of the triggers being amended, but it is otherwise very well done. Those not used the Arma engine may have a steeper learning curve, but the campaign tutorials do a good job of taking you through the many controls. Online is great fun and a good alternative to Red Orchestra 2. Some people have suffered game crashes, but so far it has not crashed once for me and I have played through both campaigns and spent a lot of time online playing on my server. Online the game comes loaded with a lot of PvP (King of the Hill, Advance and Secure etc) type missions, there are also death matches and TvT too. There are some co-op missions there too, but less focus is given to these as apposed to the Arma series where there were more co-op missions out of the box. The game has a lot of potential in that the Arma editor is here, as is the massive script library (with a few nice IF additions). Very soon the community content will start rolling and this game will then really come into it's own. This is so much more than a mod or addon and is worth the money. Don't forget as well that the RRP of this game is only half that of a mainstream big publisher game - it's a steal really. Warning though - if twitch shooters are your thing and/or you hate Arma and games like Red Orchestra 2 - this may not be for you. It's a tactical shooter that operates at a slower pace and the real joy is playing online with like-minded friends. I'm having great fun with it so far.