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Steel Soldiers
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Graphics & Sound:
To fully experience the graphics in Steel Soldiers, you have to have a monster machine with a monster video card. I could manage to play at 800x600 with everything but anti-aliasing, but most computers won't be able to manage even that. Fortunately the engine is eminently tweakable, letting you turn off a number of visual effects that can significantly speed up the gameplay. Despite the rather heavy graphical load, Steel Soldiers isn't all that pretty. The landscapes, while varied, are all almost identical. The first time I saw a 'forest' level, I had to laugh--there were about five trees scattered around the entire thing. The landscapes are all a little muddied, and while they do get more interesting as the game progresses, sometimes you feel like you're fighting over the same plot of dirt over and over. Combine that with sometimes indistinguishable unit graphics, especially at higher zoom levels, and the game sometimes feels behind the times despite the sharp visual effects. Steel Soldiers' equivalent to FMV, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant. It's done in a pseudo-comic book style, and it looks fantastic. The sound effects in Steel Soldiers are nothing really special. You'll hear lots of ackack, explosions, jeeps revving, and other sounds that you expect in any RTS. The use of relatively conventional units makes this even more conspicuous. The music is there, but it's nothing particularly memorable; more background white noise and less something to destroy by. The voice acting, however, is fantastic. Each character has a particular idiosyncratic style of speech, and the hilariously overblown Zod sounds right in this sort of game. There's a bunch of humour as you play, both in the game at large and during the cutscenes, and while some of the jokes are a little silly, I found myself smirking through much of the game. Good stuff. |
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Gameplay:
And once you can get over the difficulty curve of Steel Soldiers, you'll find yourself playing a very nice little game. It's basically a 3D refinement of Z, a game I still throw into my CD-ROM occasionally, but what's there is quite a bit of fun. It's not particularly original, and it has its frustrating moments, but Steel Soldiers can be quite enjoyable for fans of the genre. The storyline is surprisingly engrossing. Once-Commander Zod has been sent to the future's equivalent of BFE, and with the new cease-fire, his last outlet of fun has been stoppered. Of course, something goes wrong--a patrol discovers a new airfield, and promptly blows the plane out of the sky, getting captured in the process--and it's up to you to command the beer-swilling robot troops and find out just what happened. The storyline is constantly tongue-in-cheek, but it's there, and the missions rarely feel like they were simply 'tacked on' to make the game longer. Unlike most RTSes, territory is a very tangible thing in Steel Soldiers. Any map is broken up into a large number of zones, each with a 'flag' to capture. Every flag has a number on it, depicting the amount of resources pumped into your reserves if you take over that land. The more land you control, the faster you can build things, repair, and in general win the game; if you let your opponent take a much larger chunk of the map than you control, you have to play very savvily to pull the game out of the gutter. This sort of resource management is a good thing, in my opinion; instead of having to babysit gold mines and such, you can simply look at the minimap and see just what the zones of control are and who's probably winning. Aside from the territory-based progression of the game, however, Steel Soldiers is almost painfully standard fare. You have lots of troop types, ranging from peashooters to walking tanks to technicians that can take over enemy units and buildings; you have vehicles, which move a lot faster than troops but cannot capture territories; you have a number of structures that you can build, ranging from the requisite factories to radar towers to defense buildings like emplacements and towers. You can only build in zones that you control. At the beginning of the game, most of the zones on the map are not controlled by anyone, and it's absolutely necessary that you run out and take control of as many as possible. Most of the closer zones have unowned buildings inside of them--factories, radar, and so on--and claiming the land instantly gives you control of those buildings. This is all well and good, if a little hackeneyed. Unfortunately, controlling your units is a little more difficult than it should be. Formations are effectively nonexistent, which makes troop movement much more frustrating than it should be; don't be surprised if three or four of your units split off, go around some bizarre way, and get mauled by enemy emplacements on the way. Add to this the fact that the single-player AI is psychotically precise, pumping out units and commanding with perfection, and you have a very challenging game. The fact that you can't pause and give out orders is even more trying. Battles may drag on for much longer than most RTSes, as territories ebb and flow, which can be a frustrating experience. The game sports a skirmish mode as well, along with the requisite multiplayer modes. Playing against humans is much more fulfilling, as they don't have the animal precision that the computer does. |
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Difficulty:
To put it simply, Steel Soldiers is hard if you don't hit the ground running and start doing everything that you can. Even on the Normal difficulty level, the game can be amazingly challenging. I didn't even attempt the Hard level, as I'm sure I would have been beaten into the dirt. The AI is ruthless and relentless, and you will lose unless you play properly. The absolute most important thing to do at the beginning of the game is grabbing territory; getting control of 'free' emplacements is absolutely critical, as if you don't have the production methods, the enemy will. Watching twenty troops pour into your base because the computer wrested control of three production facilities within a few minutes of starting the game can be frustrating.
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Game Mechanics:
Most of the standard RTS controls are in place in Steel Soldiers. You left-click to move the units and right-click to pull up the unit menus, although you have to right-click directly on the unit to do that. [A recent patch has added hotkey support for this, which is a Very Good Thing.] You can right-click and drag on the ground to move the screen, which is by far one of the most efficient ways, as the edge scrolling is abysmally slow. Units can have passive, agressive, and neutral stances, and can be set to guard other units or buildings. The core mechanics are solid, if only because this sort of thing has been done a large number of times--most of the concepts are either standard RTS or straight from Z. I experienced at least one crash in the game, despite running the highest patchlevel; fortunately, I was unable to duplicate it. It was still frustrating, however. Steel Soldiers isn't particularly original, although it will strike people who never played Z as a little strange in its resource management methods. The units are standard, the buildings are standard, and the combat is by-the-book. But the level of tactical considerations is much higher than most games of the genre, as keeping control of widespread territories is absolutely vital to your success. It's not the best RTS to start with; an unforgiving AI and clumsy interface make for an unintuitive start into a genre. And people who can't cope with having to replay hour-long battles should definitely stay away; the game can shift at a moment's notice, and unless you creep-and-save, you may get wiped out and have to start over. But fans of the genre will find quite a bit to like here, especially those who played the original title. Steel Soldiers has enough charm to make it stand out a little more against the background noise of hundreds of RTS titles. Whether it stands out enough is for history to decide. |
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-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon |
Minimum System Requirements:
Win9x/Me/2K, P2 266/K6-2 550, 8MB 3D accelerator, 64MB RAM, 650MB HD Space, 4x CD-ROM, sound card, mouse, keyboard |
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Test System:
Athlon 1.1GHz running Win98 SE, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2 GTS w/ 32MB RAM, SoundBlaster Live!, 8x DVD-ROM |
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