Armor Command

Overview

An alien race has arrived and it wants to enslave humanity. The Earth has united against the invaders, collecting resources to support the war. On the borders of space between the two races, their fleets are engaged in a deadly battle to the finish. You can play either the humans or the aliens in this combination of real-time strategy and first-person shooter.

Gameplay

I was disappointed in this game. First, the interface is unfortunately really awkward, as there is a REALLY high learning curve and your mouse is always "rubber banded" to the currently selected unit. In other words, you must have one unit selected at all times and there is always a line drawn (in 3D) from the unit you have selected to your mouse cursor (sort of like the rubber band select box you see in the 2D world) that is quite distracting, and as you move that line around, you are actually changing your perspective. This can rapidly cause a pseudo-motion sickness similar to what some people experience while watching some of the 3D shooters. This game is unplayable unless you learn all the keyboard commands, which aren’t well-documented. Perspectives can get ALL messed up. Mostly, the world rotates around you in a very non-intuitive fashion as you move the mouse around the screen, causing a great deal of disorientation until you get used to it.. There were many times I was sure a particular landmark/unit was to my right, when it really was behind me or to my left, because of the disorientation. But, to be fair, it is kind of nice to be able to jump into the lead vehicle for an attack force, and be able to control which units the force is targeting.

Graphics

The 3D graphics were okay, but they were nothing particularly great. Armor Command is 3D-accelerated, but the graphics quality is nowhere even near the caliber of most of the first-person 3D shooters that are currently out there. I found that I didn’t spend much time able to really look at the 3D graphics, since I had to switch to the overhead "satellite" view in order to play the game.

Audio

Satisfactory, but nothing great. The patch that is available improves this somewhat, but is large enough to be prohibitive to download.

System Requirements

Pentium 90 with 3D Accelerator card or Pentium 166, 16 MB RAM, 30 MB hard drive space.

Documentation:

The documentation consists primarily of a reference for each of your units, and keyboard shortcuts. Without it, the game is very difficult to play, in my opinion.

Bottom Line

This one is going on the shelf and may not get pulled back out very often. The concept is nice, but I’d like to see the interface re-worked to be more intuitive.