![]() ![]() It was unplayable on the 300, choppy on the 450, and I still experienced occasional hops and jumps on the 600 when a huge battle was unfolding. I played Force Commander on a Celeron 300, a PII450, and a PIII600. Although the minimum specs are a P266, Force Commander is a system hog, and you'll notice framedrop and slowdown on all but the most robust of computer systems. Sure, it's ugly, hard to control, and the AIs not all that great, but at least it runs well, right? No such luck. The interface can be removed altogether, but you lose much of the functionality of the game without it, so it's even more problematic to play the game full screen than it is to squint and bear it. As if this wasn't bad enough, the icons for your individual selected units are so blurry that they actually induced headaches in a few of the weaker members of the IGN compound. It's blocky, it's jagged, and all of the text in the interface is presented in huge, chunky fonts that looks like something out of my Apple II days circa 1984. Not only does it take up a third of the bottom of your screen, relegating the battlefield to an elongated top portion of your formerly extensive monitor but, like the rest of the game, it's just plain ugly to boot. The interface in Force Commander is one of the worst I've seen in a long time. But after encountering numerous camera positioning and clipping problems where my view was stuck behind part of the landscape, I gave up on even trying to rotate the camera, instead fixing my view in one position and simply moving the camera left, right, forward, and backward. Speaking of the view, at first I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to move the camera around the 3D battlefield. Of course, none of this really matters anyway since usually you'll have the view zoomed out so far in an attempt to control all 60 of your units in real time that all you see is a bunch of blue boxes shooting at beige blobs. The rigid unit animation is even worse as your troops skim and skate above the surface of the terrain, not synchronizing with the movement of their legs at all. Why the design team decided to surround each of the units with a glowing box when a flat colored circle at each unit's feet would have sufficed is beyond me. And all of the polygons in the Stormtrooper models don't even fit together properly, making the once ominous Troopers resemble laughable floating suits of armor.Īll of this is made even worse by the fact that the blue boxes that surround your units are incredibly distracting and make it impossible to discern your troops from a distance. If you zoom in to get a good look at your units you can almost count the polygons that comprise each. The poor unit models don't do much to help the visual end of Force Commander, either. This turns once vibrant locales such as Yavin IV and Endor into little more than mottled sheets of green, gray, and brown stretched over a blocky 3D skeleton. The explosions are weak, the animation is stiff, and there's nary a shadow in the game save the solid black patches in the pitiful cutscene briefings.Īlthough you'll recognize many of the settings in Force Commander from the Star Wars movies, all of the landscapes are washed-out, bland, and lifeless. The game begins with a rather nice rendered scene of a AT-ST running away from some rebel tanks in a deep, dark canyon, but this only lasts for about five seconds.then things fall apart). From the very start of the game the graphics are blotchy, blurry, and blocky (Well, not actually the very start. This isn't necessarily the case with Force Commander, as there are plenty of other things that mar the gameplay experience, but the visuals certainly play a big part in its downfall. Now I know the old adage, "Good graphics don't make the game." But I also know that bad graphics can ruin one. They won't even move to the edge of a ledge and use the terrain to their advantage.and this is just the beginning of what's wrong with LucasArt's foray into the 3D RTS realm. Sure, the 3D terrain does offer some strategic value, but you wouldn't know it from the computer AI as units will continue to fire into the ground continuously if an opposing unit is below them without ever moving to an acceptable firing spot. It makes the game much more tedious to play than it should be, and it's just plain ugly. What could have been a great feature to enhance the way we play RTS games turned out to be Force Commander's biggest undoing. In an odd twist of fate, Force Commander actually suffers from its use of a 3D engine. "What has happened to my once beautiful Star Wars?," I asked, dismayed at the bland, dappled scene in front of me. "Oh my god! Say it isn't so! Hot water burn baby, hot water burn baby!" This rather odd string of phrases was what my office mates witnessed when I loaded up Force Commander this week and started playing the first mission. ![]()
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