Battlezone

Rating: 5/5

The original Battlezone was a revolutionary first-person tank game launched in October 1980.

Whether you remember it fondly or not, however, is not important. Computers are more than a hundred times more powerful now than they were then, and Activision has applied that power to make a game that is just as ground-breaking, despite bearing little relation to the original.

In this game, as in the original, you occupy a tank rolling around an alien landscape, blasting foes. But that's where the similarities end.

In the original Battlezone, the land was flat as a pool table, broken up by the occaisional cube or pyramid. Now the terrain is still fairly desolate, but it really looks like the surface of a world, with mountains and craters.

More importantly, you aren't alone any more. Battlezone has become a kind of first person Command and Conquer, with 30 different units to control and if you get tired of fighting the computer, you can battle up to four players on the internet or eight on a network.

While Atari didn't feel the need to explain back in 1980 why you were rolling around a wire-frame world, Activision has taken the trouble to invent a story, though you'll wonder why they bothered.

Believe it or not, these battles with hovering tanks and Magnetic Acceleration Guns are all taking place in the 1960s and early 1970s between the Americans and Soviets. The space race is just a cover for a war across eight worlds over alien "bio-metal" (think of Command and Conquer's "Tiberium").

I admit I worried when I heard that the new Battlezone combined strategy and arcade-style action. History has shown that most such hybrids end up favouring one half of the mix over the other (or doing both badly).

I am glad to be able to tell you that Activision has got it right this time.

It plays well as a straight-forward action game - the quality of the graphics is very good, and the terrain is very convincing. As for the strategy element, they have figured out an interface that really works well.

Instead of switching between a "planning mode" and a "fighting mode", you can control everything from the cockpit of the vehicle you have chosen. The sophisticated AI makes this easy. If you want to control precisely where a unit will go, you select it through your "command interface" and literally "point" at an area of ground. But you can also give commands like "guard the factory" or "follow me closely".

The way it works is very straightforward. To get a tank to go to nav beacon 2, for example, you would type 1 (offensive weapons), 1 (tank), 2 (go to), 4 (waypoint), 1. To speed things up further, you can create battle groups which you command with a single keypress.

The documentation is 112 pages long, but more than half of this is taken up with unit descriptions and the game's "story". Description of how to actually play and control things is rather sparse-fortunately, once you get the hang of it, it is mostly straightforward. There is a keyboard template for reference if you forget anything.

There are a few non combat scenarios available to let you figure out how to identify units and move around, and the first few American missions on the moon are a good, easy way to learn to build other units and lead them into attack.

The "cut scenes" are a little limited - basically a still image with a voice-over - but this isn't an interactive movie, it's a shoot-'em-up. I'm glad they put their money and development time into making the game great instead of just adding "chrome".

The only early frustration was figuring out how to use a joystick.

Clearly, in a first person combat game, a joystick will be a popular way to control your units. Unfortunately, the documentation makes no reference to how to set this up, and when I went into the input configuration part of the software, it only let me choose which joystick I wanted to use. I was at a complete loss as to what each button would do!

Evidently others were in the same position, as a joystick configuration document was one of the first items I saw on Activision's website. Changing the default configuration is still not for the faint hearted though.

Once you have gotten the hang of the game by playing through the fairly easy American campaign and the harder Russian one, it's time to move on to multi-player. Setting up a game or joining one is fairly easy. Activision runs a central server where you can find opponents and the game logs into it automatically when you select "internet".

As well as the traditional "deathmatch" games, which you can join at any time as long as there are "slots" available, you can play several "strategy" maps which allow you to build up your base and launch multi-unit assaults against your foes.

Playing against several other players on the internet, each of which can have several units, can be jerky, especially if you are in the UK and most of them are abroad. Of course, if you can play on a LAN, you are laughing. Just remember, each player has to have their own CD to fight.

When this game was previewed, we thought it would be good - I'm glad to say that exposure to the shipping product has shown it to be even more impressive than expected.