Ground Control II Blows

[Sol Invictus]

If the demo is any indication of the game's final state, then I'm sad to say that the state of the game is in is, frankly, garbage.

When I first heard the announcement of GCII, I was expecting a game with the same form of gameplay as the original Ground Control, with its squads and so forth. GCII, as it is, bears little resemblence to the original game. First off, squads don't exist anymore and units are controlled individually (a la C&C), but you can only select 16 units at a time (a la StarCraft) and the fact that you'll be watching over 50 units at any given time will cause a lot of confusion.

One of the things I liked about Ground Control were the squads. You could select a few squads at a time and there wouldn't be any hassle whatsoever in doing so. The fact that you could name your squads and they could get medals (though they did not affect gameplay whatsoever) throughout the game's campaign lent the game a lot of feeling of uniqueness.

Another problem with the sequel is the existence of 'secondary mode' which turns some of your units (especially rocket soldiers) into walking powerhouses. Superweapons existed in the original GC but there was a limit to how many times you could use them (1-3 times). There's no question that multiplayer games in GCII will come down to who can click the secondary mode the fastest.

In the original game, you only had a limited number of units per mission which you selected for your dropship before the mission started. Not so in GCII, you can summon reinforcements at any given moment to drop zones provided you have the resource points to do so, so it's really not that much different than games like C&C with its unit factories. Resource points are gained simply by being in control of a dropzone or mission critical point. They generate an infinite amount of points so the single player missions will probably come down to holding down the fort until you can afford as many units as you can get to overrun the enemy.

To add insult to injury, the game's AI is practically nonexistent. Enemies stand in the spot as they are attacked by mortar fire from over 3 screens away (you heard right, artillery is more powerful than ever) or they're sniped down by a group of several Raptor snipers. What's even more ridiculous is how snipers can take out armored turrets faster than any other unit, including tanks (hoverdynes).

All in all, the game is a bust and it's even a step back from the original C&C, much less RTS games released today. Your units don't even go into a prone/crawl position or even scatter when they're hit by incoming fire. There's no command to scatter, either - and formations are terribly buggy (in the final beta before the game was announced gold) and don't always work.

I'd just stave off on buying this title and wait for WH40K: Dawn of War, or buy a cheaper, but much better game like Blitzkrieg: Burning Horizon instead. That game looks good, sounds good, plays good, and offers all the tactical options you'd expect in a good RTS, unlike GCII here.

Oh yeah, have you guys ever seen the GUI? It fills up half the screen, needlessly too. It sucks.

The game is completely scripted, and it's not even scripted properly. How exciting! Features implemented into the RTS industry years ago, like finding research upgrades, unit enhancements, hero units (WC3, WH40K), squads (GC1, Blitzkrieg, Total War games), unit customization (WH40K, Earth 2150, WZ2100 had this) and a bunch of other well-established features are apparently unknown to the people at Massive Entertainment.

Perhaps those features would make the game 'too complex' for their target audience. I wonder who their target audience is: 9 year olds? Even that Homeworld ripoff by Disney had more features, and it was targetted to kids.

As I said before, it's 'dumbed down' compared to the original C&C - that says a lot. Stay away from this one.

 

[Sol Invictus]

One more thing to add: How the hell did Massive fall so far from GC?

 

[Fez]

Jesus, they really have screwed it up then. That's a hell of a list of game play faults there, and serious ones too.

As you said, how the hell did they manage to introduce so many new flaws into the game? No one would have batted an eyelid if all they did was add a new campaign, a bit of polish and better graphics, but it seems like they just tore up the old design docs, burned all the old copies of GC 1 in the office and started a new game while they drank hard liquor and snorted coke off of a hooker's belly.

If it is all as bad as you say I can only imagine what the flames will be like when they release it retail and the old fans get hold of it.

In fact I’m now morbidly interested in downloading this now, just to see what a train wreck it is. Is it even worth that?

I really did like the purity of the original, no resource management, and no tank rush tactics. A game where recon was an essential tactic and thinking on the fly had to be combined with grand plans for strategy. What a tragedy, it is comparable with Fallout being turned into that POS "we got hookers!" game.

 

[Sol Invictus]

A lot of the fans who downloaded the game made a long angry list detailing pretty much all the stuff I mentioned and some other stuff I forgot to mention, like the fact that you can only play two sides in the sequel, as opposed to three or more sides like all RTS's these days. You can only play the good guys and the 'weird' guys (the new alien species) but not the bad guys. I can't think of any RTS where you couldn't play as the bad guys in multiplayer. Most RTS games even have a campaign for the bad guys (Ground Control kind of did).

The thread is (9) pages long, and growing. According to the beta-testers of GCII, the private Beta forum on Massive Entertainment's website is filled with, more or less, complaints about the game's flaws as both a game, and as a sequel.

The graphics might be nice, but the gameplay is nil - and there's quite a number of RTS's coming out that offer better graphics with some actual gameplay - namely WH40K: Dawn of War and a number of WWII-themed games like Soldiers: Heroes of WWII , Axis and Allies, and Codename: Panzers. I don't know about A&A, but Soldiers and C have destructible environments. Soldiers is more squad-level (akin to Syndicate), though. Great game. Comes out this month.

At the moment, I'm playing and enjoying every moment of Blitzkrieg: Burning Horizon. The graphics are top notch. The units are 2d (with the exception of the vehicles, which, I think, are 3d? Could be voxels.) and the gameplay's pretty good - no resources, just reinforcements. Stalingrad, which is also coming out this month is based on the same engine, but it's supposed to be more realistic, among other things, so I'll be looking at that.

Also out this year is the stunningly gorgeous Earth 2160, sequel to the acclaimed E2150, which not only featured destructible environments, but also unit customization (probably the first RTS to borrow this feature from MOO2), a 'HQ' as a center of operations, from where you directed your missions throughout the globe, research and development, supply lines, and so forth. I preferred Warzone 2100 to E2150, but they were, and still are, both damn fine games.

What's great about Earth 2160 is that it utilizes Per Pixel Shader 1.0, 1.2, 2.0 and 3.0 native support in its Earth 3 Engine and employs graphics with detail comparable to first person shooters.

Yeah, basically what I'm trying to say is that there's quite a few good RTS's coming out this year to choose from and GCII is definitely not one of them.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Also out this year is the stunningly gorgeous Earth 2160, sequel to the acclaimed E2150, which not only featured destructible environments, but also unit customization (probably the first RTS to borrow this feature from MOO2), a 'HQ' as a center of operations, from where you directed your missions throughout the globe, research and development, supply lines, and so forth. I preferred Warzone 2100 to E2150, but they were, and still are, both damn fine games.

Warzone 2100 was out first and had those features. Earth 2150 basically ripped off WZ2100.

 

[Fez]

Well at least we won't need to worry about a lack of good stategy games to play because of GC 2 being shit. Ta for the heads up, I had a look around some webpages and I'm now looking forward to that lot coming out.

 

[dagamer667]

I will definitely play it, but I agree with some of those complaints myself.

Instead of squads you now have groups like most RTS games, but I really liked GC1's emphasis on controlling squads instead of single units along with a really handy overview of how your squads are doing. I also cringed when I saw what 16 infantrymen can do in secondary mode. Way too powerful for what is essentially the lowest-level unit in the game. In GC1, anything tougher than a scout or a light tank couldn't even be scratched by regular infantry from the front (with TEMPLARS being a very notable exception to the rule). Still, an infatry squad could use its special weapon to take out one or two tanks if there is no support nearby. Now, clicking the secondary mode gives those puny soldiers infinite AT rockets that seem to shred non-infantry units like paper. Once again, it wouldn't be a problem if each soldier only carried three or so of these, but they each seem to have a Bag of Holding filled to the brim with these.

I also thought that reinforcements would be limited and only available a few times per mission. I thought it would be along the lines of having a few extra dropships you could fill up before the mission and bring them to the battlefield later as you progressed through the mission, in addition to the ones you brought in at the start.

 

[dagamer667]

Gah. Looks like you were right about not being able to play all three sides. Now, THAT is a real disappointment. When I played GC1, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the briefing for the first Order mission instead of the usual credits you see at the end of the game.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Yeah, I think that throughout the campaign you can only play one side (the good guys) and nobody else - though the multiplayer allows you to play as the wooky aliens, but not the bad guys. Either way, it's pretty lame. It's become standard procedure for most RTS's these days to offer 3 playable sides, or at the very least the abiliry to play as the bad guys. Considering how few units there are in the game , it's pretty lame.

Another thing is how they're trying to flout the wooky Alien's 'morphing abilities' as if they're something special. The fact is that those wooky aliens morphing abilities are no different than the good guys' secondary ability. What it does, and this cracks me up every time, is when you use those special abilities, the units essentially dissapear and new replacement units fall from the sky. It's especially evident with the tanks. Talk about lame scripting. That probably explains why your units cant assume prone position, crouch, or anything like that.

 

[dagamer667]

I thought you could play as aliens in SP.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Well, you might be able to - but they're not special at least from what I've seen in the beta version. Apparently, the reason for getting rid of the squads was to accomodate the new aliens. Their programming team doesn't seem to be very flexible when it comes to the user interface, I suppose. Starcraft featured three distinct races which played completely differently and there didn't have to be any 'compensations' for that.

All of GCII's lack of lustre comes down to laziness.

 

[Astromarine]

I must say that WH40K: Dawn of War is singlehandedly convincing me to get back into the tabletop game. It looks quite nice, and I like how they are trying to keep all the spirit and conventions of the game without tying themselves to the tabletop mechanics.