varrak

First, I purchased this game from Matrix. I realize that my review will not count toward Command's overall rating. Steam might think that makes me a fan somehow, but not at all. Is it a good game? The bottom line is NO. It's painful to play. Others might have you believe it's complicated and difficult. It's not at all--although looking at a database table or spreadsheet might seem disorienting at first. This product, however, is simply and poorly designed. I personally don't care about the windows interface or freely available NASA map (with ugly NATO icons), but simple player tasks are difficult/awkward and the responsiveness overall is choppy. Even simple map panning is awkward. The devs clearly bring the intricacies of the database to the forefront at the expensive of usability and realism. How could realism suffer in such a "hardcore" game? Because it is solely focused on equipment and technology (their beloved database/OOB), so the realism (and fun) of how strategy, operational art, and tactics synchronize is totally missing from the game. The front end of the game provides no realistic (or intuitive) simulation of the needed tools and controls. The "mission editor" is about as close as they get, but even that comes off poorly considering other games. Want to fight a modern Korean War in a theater-level air/sea campaign? You can't. Want to implement your own Silent Hawk helicopter into a special ops raid scenario? No. You can't touch the locked database without making an approved, licensed, paid, DLC product for them. Add to that, every single unit in the game acts with the same level of morale, surprise, training, competence, leadership, etc. The devs focus entirely on a tech database which works exclusively to model equipment traits via connected tables. If 2 Greek F-16 Falcons go up against 2 Turkish F-16 Falcons, the outcome is a roll of the dice. Want to setup waypoints/steerpoint for your aircraft with timing, altitude and posture settings. How about an ATO with packages and supporting flights? There is nothing like that is in this game. You can only set a reference point(s) on the ground for a unit to move to or to define an area -- in the same way you can in any simple rts. That's nowhere near professional quality planning and control for a sophisticated wargame. The game actually plays like a really bad rts game; that has terrible mouse and keyboard commands. At this point, rts player control is ubiquitous. The devs could have at least followed the best practices already established by those folks. Despite a basic 25-year old windows interface, you can't remap a single hotkey. They think they know best for you. What's the real deal with this game? As you are fighting the game's controls instead of focused on your opponent, you can be confident that the jumbled icons on the map are meticulously replicating minuscule radar band calculations for you. To be blunt, I see a group of Harpoon modders who focus almost exclusively on milking the old Harpoon game's database with their changes. Meanwhile, they lock their database version down so that someone else can't do the same thing they did -- without working licensed/paid content through them. Their Inferno and LIVE products are proof of this strategy. Yes, you can hobble together a scenario, but only given strict areas of control and extremely limited scope... a single battle with no external influencers. When asked by a new player just a few days ago (on the Matrix forum) about modding, Sunburn (listed as a dev) responded with one line only, "Will you pay for this?" Interesting and telling response from a group of Harpoon hackers. For $80 you should expect a lot more from a GAME you plan to play, particularly one that released beta tester created scenarios as paid content. Moments after I purchased the game, I made the mistake of pressing the Campaign button at the top of the opening menu screen. I was greeted with an advertisement to buy some more content. My verbal response to that would violate Steam's terms. I think these guys are a lot better at business development than game development.