Ground Control

Genre: RTS (squad based)

Developer: Massive Entertainment

Publisher: Rebellion/Sierra

Released: 2000

Zolgar paid: Gifted on GOG.

Beaten: No, lost interest about 1/4th the way in.

Zolgar's rating: 6/10

Replayability: Moderate.

I wanted to like this game, I really did. It looks pretty awesome. Unfortunately it just failed to keep my interest. Mechanically it's a very sound game, with controls that are only slightly unintuitive, but customizable, and it seems to have a good story too.

So why couldn't I keep playing it? Simple, it stagnated so quickly for me that I felt like I was playing the same damn mission over and over. I am sure it gets better later, but I don't have a lot of free time, and have a backlog of nearly 100 games to play and review.

The game itself is fairly standard squad based RTS fare. I'm not typically a fan of squad based games (I prefer to build massive bases and crush my foes under a swarm of bodies >.>), but Ground Control does it very well. The squads feel more like the forces you get in a typical 'build your base' RTS, and it controls much the same way, too. It adds some nice things like squads having special abilities, and your command unit providing repairs/healing.

As well, the AI is good enough that you don't find yourself spending as much time micromanaging, more like just setting your preferences, and occasionally directing to specific targets.

The story makes me want to keep playing, too. Much akin to Star Craft, and other RTS of the era, you play a 'field commander', who gets orders from high-ranking douchebags who've never seen real combat, and in proper RTS fashion you switch sides partway through and start playing the “bad guys”.

It opens up with you playing Major Sarah Parker of the Crayven Corporation, in charge of a fairly small contingent of men, and expected to somehow pull miracles out of your backside on a hostile world, when you're not given the man power to do your job right.. why? Simple, it's just not a 'financially sound option' to give you the proper manpower.

Does a good job making you hate the Crayven Corporation right off the bat, heh.

You are facing off against the Order of the New Dawn (“Dawnies”), an organization that gets presented to you as religious zealots trying to gain the power to have their own 'little' Crusade. By 'little', of course, I mean galaxy-spanning.

Early on, you learn that the planet Crayven and the Dawnies are fighting over houses alien technology.. and by the sounds of things really bad alien technology which the Dawnies are trying to harness.

But, this is an RTS, it's not so simple as 'good guys' and 'bad guys'..

After the Crayven Corporation takes over the planet, and manages to push the Dawnies in to hiding, you switch over to controlling Deacon Jarred Stone, of the Order of the New Dawn, trying to take back the planet from Crayven, and stop THEM from harnessing the bad alien tech. Just gets more interesting from there, but I've said too much.

The way the story is told, it makes me really want to continue playing it and see the story progress.. unfortunately, the game itself.. just drags for me.

Another thing the game does really well, is it lets you customize your squads. You're not just given 'soldiers' and 'tanks', well.. OK, you kinda are, but you can first pick their over-all loadout, like whether you want your soldiers to be Marines, or Navy SEALS (not exactly, but you get the point), from there you can pick the focus of that squad, such as their special abilities, and if they want to be specced for speed, armor or damage (or a good balance). The same goes for the vehicles, too.

Eventually you get 'jets' too, but because "Crayven controls the sky." you're not able to requisition air support until further in to the game than I got. Doesn't make sense to me, seems that if Crayven controls the sky, then Air-to-Ground attacks would be in their best interest.

As well, your squads gain 'experience' based off the number of battles they go in to. I'm not overly sure how much this changes them, but it's a nice touch.

So now I'm sure you're thinking “You like the story, you like the units, and you say the gameplay is good.. so why did you give up on it?” or something like that. Well, this is a good point in time for me to go in to the detractors of the game.

First and foremost, it's slow, I mean like “start your units moving across the map and walk away to get a soda” type slow. Granted, I tended to run heavy armor tanks, but still. Combat is also slow, realism is great and all, but even on easy fights just drag on and on.

It's also slow to progress your unit options. By the time I gave up on it, I had just gotten my 2^nd soldier type opened, and my 5^th squad. I had 3 types of tanks, and 2 types of soldiers to choose from, that was it, and I'd been going with tanks and soldiers for every frelling mission so far.

The missions also just kind of blend together as 'more of the same'. “Defend this location from the Dawnies.” or “Take this location from the Dawnies.”

Without starting to get in to irritating levels of micromanagement, it's hard to get your squads in to good tactical positions. Sometimes it's hard to get them to go where you want when you go in to micromanagement mode.

If you're not playing it on easy, you deal with friendly fire. Which is a pain in the ass, because of how the units sometimes decide to go where ever they darn well please, but they lack the AI to adjust their position so they're not getting shot in the back by their allies, or not shooting their allies.

Oh yes, and it has the most titanic strike against it possible for me with a strategy game:

No skirmish mode. Sometimes I jut want to kill things without worrying about the storyline.

For me, those factors make the game honestly rather boring mechanically, despite all it's great potential. I'm not going to sit through a bunch of boring, repetitive and, predictable missions in order to watch the story progress, and hope that it decides to get better somewhere along the way.

I wish I could provide you with a run down of the difference, if any, between the Dawnies and Crayven. What I saw of the Dawnies playing against them though, it seems there isn't any.. but honestly? I couldn't stand to play the game long enough to find out, I tried. I was sitting there thinking “Maybe the game gets better with the Dawnies.. maybe it gets better..” ultimately though, like I said, I've got a backlog of nearly 100 games, I can only afford to give one game so much time in hopes of it getting better.

I would, however, really recommend picking it up if you find it for a good price, and giving it a try. Especially if you're more patient than I am, and enjoy squad-based strategy games.. and it might help if you don't have a titanic backlog of games you impulse purchased because “Oooh, it's on sale!”

Screemshots shamelessly stolen from various internet sources. If you see yours and would like it taken down, or like attribution, let me know.

TL:DR

“Epic potential, flawed implementation. An astoundingly boring masterpiece.”

Availability and price:
FilePlanet: Free (no expansion, requires personal information)

GOG:$5.99 (includes Dark Conspiracies expansion)

GamersGate: $5.99 (includes Dark Conspiracies expansion)

Amazon(physical): ~$13.50 (Expansion costs ~$45.)

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Genre: RPG, Action/Tactical (Isometric, Real time and/or Turn Base)

Developer: Troika

Publisher: Sierra/Activision

Released: 2001

Zolgar paid: $5.99

Beaten: Multiple times.

Zolgar's rating: Vanilla 7/10, Mod/bugfix'd 9/10

Replayability: High

Arcanum, like the other two Troika titles, is a flawed masterpiece. The detail work they put in to the world and story is, as always, top notch. However, as always, their quality control was slightly lacking, leading to a very buggy release. Developers and fans, however, have continued to support it long after Sierra tossed it aside as rubbish, and there are a great number of bug-fixes and quality of life mods. Meaning that while the game is worth dealing with the bugs, you don't have to.

I was exposed to Arcanum early in my RPG days, and before I even knew what Steampunk was. I have to say, it really fueled my love of both. To date, it is the closest I have found to what Fallout 3 should have been, probably because it was made by the guys from Black Isle, creators of Fallout 1 and 2 (as well as many other great titles).

Arcanum is one of the few RPGs I've found to have an almost completely nonlinear story, that lets you decide if you want to be the hero, be a villain, or just get rich and say screw the story; yet at the same time, it makes it very easy to pick the story back up, no matter how distracted you've been with side quests or just trying to make enough money to get loaded up on bullets.

The story opens up with a CGI cinematic (that for it's time was very well done) of orcs attacking a Zeppelin from weaponized flying machines, followed by you finding a dying gnome who gives you a ring and tells you to “Find the boy”. What does this ring mean, who was this Gnome, who is the boy and why is he important? The game starts off leaving you to wonder that, but doesn't give you much time to ponder, as you're immediately greeted by a slightly under-educated religious fanatic who swears you are 'the one'.. and then meet an assassin bent on killing you.

Are you 'the one'? Why does everyone want to kill you? What was up with that gnome? I could tell you, but I'd spoil the plot. Instead I'll drift in to the mechanical side of things.

Character creation:

Much akin to Fallout, Arcanum lets you choose between one of several pre-made characters (those of whom are not played are found dead in the wreckage of the Zeppelin, for a nice touch of continuity), or making your own.

If you choose to make your own, you are treated to a selection of 8 races (Elf, Gnome, Dwarf, Halfling, Half-Orc, Half-Ogre, Half-Elf.. oh and Human), and of course a gender selection (which does have a mechanical effect). And as an added bonus they can choose a 'background' which gives some minor mechanics bonus and penalty.

Then it's on to choosing your focus. Are you tech or magic oriented? Do you prefer melee or ranged combat? Or how about talking your way out of fights? Do you buy things, or craft them out of scrap and refuse you find laying around? You will want to do it all, unfortunately, you can't.

When you you think you're finished, you're given a vendor screen, which you can choose what you want to start with, very convenient!

Gameplay:

When you enter the game proper, there's something that you will notice right off the bat. This is 'old school' compared to a lot of modern games. There's no respawn (save and save often!), it's rather unforgiving if you're less combat oriented (not like say.. Baldur's Gate, but still pretty bad), and it's the type of game where you explore everything, and take anything that isn't watched by guards.

When it comes to combat, you have 2 options. Real time or turn based. When in turn Based mode, the game uses an Action Point system. Any action you take requires X points, run out of points and your turn is over. In real time mode, your Action Points reflect how fast you can do things. This can make the game slightly broken late game with a speed build, while early in the game real-time moves too fast and is suicidal.

Then there's the non-combat side of things: the many skills you have at your disposal!

This game is built for skill monkeys, almost everything can be bought or stolen if your skill is good enough. With a good stealth and lockpicking, you can slink in to a vendors shop and steal -everything- they have.. Or you can pick their pocket and steal the key to their shop.

Most of the plot-centric fights can be avoided with words, if your skill is good enough, as well people skills will get you better quests, discounts on wares, and maybe even a good time. Think I'm kidding? An attractive female can get work as a hooker. You can also get followers to fall for you, which can make for fun issues when more than one follower starts to fall for you and they get jealous of eachother.

Can't forget about followers. Throughout your adventure, you will meet a lot of crazy people. Some want to help you, some have to help you, some you can pay to help you. Depending on your charisma, your alignment and your tech/magick lean, you can get different followers, and more followers based on your charisma.

Followers are useful, depending on your build. Virgil, the prior mentioned religious nutter, is your first follower, and you can manipulate what he does a little. Most others have a certain focus, so clearly, if you're a tech oriented gunslinger, you'll do best with a nice sturdy meat shield to protect you, and maybe a rogue-type to handle locks.

In the vanilla game, your followers have kinda crappy skill distribution, however, you can get mods that change that, or there's a character editor you can download, that also edits your followers.

And finally we come to my personal favorite mechanic: Magick vs. Tech.

In Arcanum you choose whether to be a mage, or a technologist (or neither). Mages find that machines fail around them, but conversely their spells fail to affect those focused on tech. This means that while a mage may be safer from a gunslinger, he has a harder time hurting them, and also doesn't do well receiving aid from technological means. Mechanically this leads to a 'magic resist' and 'tech resist' stat, as well as critical failure chances for magic or tech gear.

If you choose magic, you spend skill points in 'schools', and with each level in said school, you gain new spells. The spell assortment is the normal range of magic spells available in any generic fantasy setting, all done quite well, and when used right they will win the game for you.

If you choose tech, you spend skill points in crafts, with each rank you learn a new schematic, and you can also find schematics all throughout the world. Schematics let you make everything from moltov cocktails, to healing salves, to fully automatic shotguns, to robots that aid you in fights. When used right, they will win the game for you.

If you go the neutral rout, you have the advantage of being able to use any gear you want (though watch out if you have too much magic or tech gear on you, as it will cause the others to malfunction!) and though you may not cast spells or build explosives, your selection of skills will be quite impressive, making you a force to be reckoned with in combat. In this case, it's your own personal skill that will win the game for you.

Then there's the weak points of Arcanum:

The graphics have honestly not aged as well as other games of it's era. They weren't precisely top notch at the time, and that was 10 years ago. For it's day I would have given it a 7 of 10 for graphics, a 5 of 10 today, for how they've aged.

The level cap is too low, and it's easy to level up far too fast. One of their weird quirks is that you gain XP per-hit, instead of just per kill. When I made a low-int half-ogre melee fighter, I hit the level cap less than half way in to the game, and my gunslinger was also to the cap well before beating the game. I don't think though that my high-charisma mage ever pinged the cap.

While the plot has a lot of twists you don't quite expect, every now and then it feels like they decided to just throw some weird needless twist in to the mix to increase the length of the game. First time through that's not really too bad. Fourth time through you're like “What purpose does this serve again?”

And if you play it Vanilla, there are just a lot of bugs to be had, and places where there's remnants of things that didn't quite make it in to the game.

Fear not! Salvation is at hand from Terra Arcanum, a site devoted to all Troika games that has a section of mods and patches for Arcanum, including a level cap remover.

For the “TL:DR” version of this review, I will borrow a quote from my friend:

“Arcanum: The greatest game made...ever. So great, you don't even care about the frelling bugs!”

Availability and price:

GOG: $5.99

Amazon: $10-20

Ebay: $5+