Reply To: First Impressions?

[f2bnp]

#6070

I sort of gave up after playing halfway for each campaign. The mutant campaign is certainly a lot easier than the “Survivors” campaign or perhaps I was better accustomed to the controls and mechanics by this point.

Before I began playing I looked into source ports, reverse-engineered engines, wrappers or anything remotely helpful in order to get the game in its best state in this day and age and found out that the only such effort is a mod for OpenRA, an open source engine for Red Alert (and perhaps even C&C Tiberian Dawn?), which struck me as odd. Why would you even bother with this if not for some practice and/or personal fun? Then again, people have “ported” Blood and Half-Life to the Doom engine, so there’s that.

Upon playing the game, I understood why the above project was ever conceived. It plays shockingly close to C&C, to the point where someone may be fooled into thinking it’s a mod for that game (actual phrase a friend of mine used to describe it in a recent chat).
A less polished version of C&C anyway, as it looks pretty rough IMO and it also plays a lot worse with somewhat weird balancing (soldiers seemed incredibly powerful compared to vehicles or was it just me?) and all sorts of weird AI behavior (hellooooooo pathfinding!). One neat trick I found and used to exploit the AI was to camp next to an oil drillers and wait for opponent’s rigs to come harvest resources at which point I destroyed them. The enemy AI will keep creating more of them and waste all its money on buying rigs. It’s still a lot of fun though and I imagine multiplayer was pretty decent at the time as well.

I also found the soundtrack to be… almost unbearable when it came to the Evolved, the Survivor side had some decent tunes.

I’m considering giving KKnD 2 a try, it’s been a few years since I last played that one and it’s apparently massively expanded in every area (although it lacks live-action FMV which is a damn shame!) and also adds another faction.