15-Aug-2001 Non C&C strategy game in 'not rubbish' shock! Engage RTS auto-review mode. Moving out. The year is 2179, and the Earth has been utterly devastated by nuclear war. No one in Australia has noticed any difference. Ho ho. Anyway, the survivors have split into three teams, the human Survivor militia, the freaky Evolved mutants and the barking mad Series 9 robots, and theyire about to face off in a real time strategy game fight. To! The! Death! Krossfire: KKND2 is a real-time strategy game, so you know what to expect. Set up a base, mine resources (in this case oil), build lots of tanks and then find some enemies to kill. To its credit, KKND2 does have some very nice looking buildings and scenery, ranging from rugged highlands to shattered urban landscapes. The ubiquitous fog-of-war is used to great effect here, with true line-of-sight meaning that rocks, trees and tall buildings block your view until you go round behind them. The enet-curtaini shroud over areas youive already visited is a little less convincing n this isnit a Saturn game for crying out loud. The main thing that sets Krossfire apart from the hundreds of other C&C clones is the Constructible units that become available once you reach a certain tech level. From the menu, players can select a light, medium or heavy chassis, and add to it a number of 'turrets' depending on the slots available. These can be guns, anti-radar devices, APCs and so on, and once you have a configuration you're happy with you can create a preset button to make more of them. Up to eight preset configurations are available during a game. There are also tons of regular units, with roughly the same types available to all three sides, ranging from simple troops up to huge laser tanks and fighter and bomber planes. A nice feature is that troops can wade in shallow water, and amphibious units can go anywhere as long as there are beaches to allow access to the water. Other handy tricks available to the player include loading radar jammers into airborne transports to make flying units invisible. Base defences include forcefields and different flavours of turret. The game also features an very streamlined interface, taking up no more than a centimetre at the right edge of the screen. It consists of menu buttons pertaining to men, vehicles, buildings etc, which pop out to give you construction options. Unlike Starcraft, this means you can panic-build more units in the middle of battle without scrolling back to your base, and you can queue up to ten of each type or even set construction to infinite if you have the cash. Even the map can be moved around the screen to get it out of the way.
KKND2 is not genre-defining by any stretch of the imagination, but it has enough nice touches to make it worthy of your attention. The landscape and building graphics are some of the best weive seen, although some of the smaller units look a little rough, and the streamlined interface and innovations like the constructibles make it easy to play. The tongue-in-cheek sense of humour is a welcome break from RTS games that take themselves too seriously, with snide comments appearing in mission briefings and the dead-pan antics of the Series 9 robots n their eDeath Mode: Oni style response to your commands is fantastic. The only real problem is that the three sides are pretty similar to each other, but that aside KKND2 is a decent second choice after you tire of Red Alert and Starcraft.
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