From: Steve Koren Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III Subject: REVIEW: Armour-Geddon Keywords: game, arcade, strategy, flight simulation Path: menudo.uh.edu Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Reply-To: Steve Koren Review of Armour-Geddon by Psygnosis. Very good 3d filled polygon game with a few flaws which keep it from being a great game. If you like simulations this is worth it. I recently bought Armour-Geddon. This is published by Psygnosis: Psygnosis 29 Saint Mary's Court Brookline MA 02146 USA Armour-Geddon is a series of linked vehicle simulators. There are simulators for Heavy Tanks, Light Tanks, Hovercraft, Helicopters, Fighters, and Bombers. You move around in a 3d filled polygon world which is fairly large. The basic goal is to collect 5 pieces of a neutron bomb which you then use to destroy a hardened enemy bunker. This is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. This enemy is trying to create a laser, and they will certainly do this before you can obtain all the bomb pieces. To slow them down, you need to destroy parts of their power grid. You have a supply of scientists, who design things, and engineers, who build things. There is perhaps 20 or so different useful gadgets you can build (vehicles, various types of weapons, fuel tanks, etc). You can allocate scientists and engineers to whichever items you feel are important. You have enough scientists but there are never enough engineers to build all the things you want. Once you build some basic supplies, you can go out and destroy some of the enemy's hardware. There are six vehicles which you can control at once, in theory. In practice, you can't control nearly that many (unless perhaps you play in two player mode). The practical limit is around two, or one when you are just learning. You can switch from one vehicle to another with a single keystroke. The old vehicle goes on auto-pilot, and either heads towards a set waypoint, or circles. You pick the vehicle you want to control, and equip it with various gadgets. All the vehicle types have a nearly identical cockpit layout which makes it easy to get used to them. Some of the controls are also the same, but they behave quite differently (as you'd expect). My favorite weapons are missiles (guided) and rockets (unguided). You first look at the map, set a waypoint to your target location, and pilot your chosen vehicle to that point. Then you shoot things. The world is a "target rich environment" :-) You can just blow up things at random, but to get very far you have to develop a strategy. You need to pick up bomb pieces with the heavy tank, but most of them are beyond the range of this tank. Therefore, you need to use a teleport pod, which allows you to move around quickly. To get a teleport pod near the bomb piece. You must drop it off with the bomber, but the bomber is a big cumbersome thing which is likely to be shot down quickly. So the first task is to fly a few "defense suppression" missions with the fighter or copter, trying to cool things off enough to get the bomber in. The fighter gets there faster and is less prone to attacks by enemy fighters and helicopters. The helicopter is slower and more vulnerable, but it is better at picking off ground targets with rockets since you can sit still. Its often hard to hit ground targets with unguided weapons when flying over them at 300 knots in the fighter. The tanks can fire rockets, lasers, or gun rounds. Fired rounds obey the laws of physics (they travel in a trajectory depending on the gun elevation). This makes it hard to hit things far away, but opens up the possibility of firing over hills and obstructions. (It should be possible in 2 player mode to fire over a mountain with the tank, and have your friend in a helicopter be a spotter for the rounds to tell you where to aim next). Each of the simulators is "moderately realistic". The flight sim, for example, is not on the level of a dedicated simulator such as Falcon, but it is reasonably realistic. Altitude, weight, etc all have effects on flight dynamics. In fact, sometimes in the helicopter you can sustain engine damage which doesn't leave enough power to maintain altitude. When this happens, sometimes you can recover by releasing all weapons to become lighter. Vehicles have "shields" which have an adjustable recharge rate. High recharge rates will drain fuel supply very quickly. The game itself is has on-disk copy protection. This is obnoxious. I'd much rather see manual keyword lookup protection. On my system I need to run a program which enables the faster 32 bit memory on my 68030 card. I can't do this with the current game, since it requires me to reboot. Thus it runs in 16 bit memory several times slower than it has to on my system. (However, this is still fast enough to be quite enjoyable). The game will run on fast processors and with fat agnuses. I do not know about 2.0 or 3000s. Sound effects are good both when you are inside the vehicle and when you are in your home base. [Several articles in comp.sys.amiga.games have stated that the game runs under 2.0 on an A3000. -JLT3] The game is also somewhat difficult. Early in the learning curve, it is hard to pilot a vehicle and have it remain alive for more than a minute or two. You get better at this over time. Landing aircraft is never easy. I can land the fighter around 50 to 75% of the time. Landing the helicopter is easy, but getting it to land _where you want_ is not so easy. Landing the hovercraft is not an issue since its always near the ground, but driving it is hard. If you move north at 100 knots, and turn the vehicle pointing west, you still move north. (One would expect a real hovercraft to do this too). There are slightly too many bad guys to really cope with in single player mode. I've never tried dual player mode, but I suspect it would be easier. (Both players work together on one team). With two people, you can have one person fly the bomber and the other a fighter escort, or similarly for the tank and a helicopter. Good teamwork could be important as it is possible to shoot your teammate if you are not careful. You can only play this with a null modem cable (you can't use a modem). Games can last a long time. I have played it far enough to get the first bomb piece, and that takes 1 to 2 hours of real time. You can save games in progress. In my opinion, enemies are encountered with unusual frequency, which causes the average vehicle lifetime to be quite short. It is not unusual for many of your vehicles to never make it back to base. I would prefer to see a model more similar to the old "Arctic fox" game where battles are serious but spaced wider apart and sometimes best avoided altogether. This makes strategy more useful and avoids the usual "blast-fest" genre. (Arctic Fox, although it had very slow animation, was unusually well done from this standpoint. It dates to 85, but is worth it to obtain if you can). The enemy encounter frequence in a game such as Falcon is much more enjoyable. The documentation is sparse. Many details are omitted and you have to just try things to find them out. For example, you need various resources (types of metals, etc) to build equipment. You start out with some, but you will need to acquire more along the way. The manual just hints at how to do this, and doesn't really mention the details. I don't quite understand this aspect even now. I hope that Psygnosis brings out an upgrade with the following features: * Variable play levels. At easier levels there would be fewer enemies. This seems like it would be quite easy to do. * A map editor. The existing world is pretty big, but the ability to make your own worlds would be a _lot_ of fun and extend the lifetime of the game. One could also create easier or harder worlds. Different objectives than the bomb scenario would also be fun. The map editor could even be a separate product for Psygnosis. I'd buy one. * A training mode where you can pilot vehicles without interference from the enemy. There is a training mode now, but you can still get shot with annoying frequency, which makes it hard to learn to operate the vehicles. * Ships with a larger fuel supply. They run out quite quickly. Using low shield recharge rates can help quite a bit here, but most of the ground vehicles still run out rapidly. * The ability to switch between vehicles is quite nice, but only has a limited usefulness. The problem is that as soon as you move to another vehicle, the first, no longer taking evasive action or returning fire, succumbs to hostile fire within about 30 seconds. (Sometimes less than that). Many times I have left a helicopter hovering, switched to another vehicle, and found that an enemy helicopter promptly started to pump several laser bursts per second into my helicopter. It naturally doesn't last long under that sort of treatment. I think that providing areas which have friendly anti-aircraft systems would provide safe places to park your vehicles when you're not running them. At the very least, there should be some sort of on-screen icon which indicates which of your deployed vehicles is currently under attack. This game is available for approximately $35 to $40 retail, or $26 mail order. It is well worth it. The documentation implies there are versions available in both English and a few of the more common European languages. On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best), I'd give this game a solid 8. It'd be higher with the addition of the few changes I've mentioned above. - Steve Koren koren@hpmoria.fc.hp.com