Unfortunately,
Battlezone II is plagued by gameplay issues that the superb first one didn’t have, and it is a poorer game because of it. Gone is the crazy Cold-War-gone-wrong plot of the first. Instead, you fight... aliens. Whee. My heart dropped when I saw this, because part of the charm of the first
Battlezone was the quirky setting. Ah, well, I thought. Perhaps the game would redeem itself in gameplay.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. The single player mode is scripted like a bad rendition of a Shakespearean tragedy. You have to do things -exactly- like the designers want you to do in the missions or you can’t proceed. Sometimes the things you have to do are so counterintuitive as to make the game almost unplayable without having to consult a strategy guide or the Battlezone II website.
The multiplayer is good... if you’re playing on a LAN. Anything less plays extraordinarily poorly. There’s an unofficial patch out that fixes a good deal of that, but nonetheless, having broken multiplayer out of the box is pretty bad.
And the gameplay itself sometimes makes almost no sense. For example, I’m in a looming tank, and somebody starts shooting at me. What’s the most efficient way to kill them? Well, it seems that in the world of Battlezone II, tanks are as maneuverable as any other vehicle, so I zoom around the enemy and shoot them from behind. Eh? The ability to hop out of your ship and shoot people on foot is good fun, mainly because the computer A.I. has serious issues with capping you while you’re on foot. I sprinted all the way across the map (well, slowly glided is more like it) and got hit once. I then hopped in a ship and got blown up almost immediately. Whee! I just like capping the enemy pilots after they eject from their ships. Heh.
And then there are the crashes, which occur at random and halfway through missions. Now, don’t get me wrong. I actually find the game rather fun, despite myself. Its blend of RTS and action really appeals to me, and once you have a comm tower, you can play the game like a 3D Total Annihilation, which is really cool. But it has some serious flaws that keep it from being a stellar game.
