Battle Command

Copyright : Ocean Software | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Once again the future of planet earth looks as bad as 99.9% of Victoria Beckhams records and vinyl making a comeback as we are in the middle of yet another war. Only you can put a stop to it (isn?t it always the way) and must tackle a series of missions using your armour plated battle tank and a turret full of ammunition, it?s a tough job but someone has to do it.

Graphics

While looking at the screen grabs below it might not look that impressive but this was once state of the art 3D graphics, those tiny dots and lines that make up the picture took a long time to code and only a few games made good use of them (Hard Drivin for example). There aren?t that many colours in the game but considering the location (battle fields) it?s not all bad, tanks are coloured differently because if they had the original colours you probably wouldn?t be able to see them. Battle Command also runs at quite a speed which is something Ocean Software were no doubt proud of when the game was finished, getting an 8-bit machine to pull this kind of challenging graphics off and run properly was something of an art back then.

Sound

Sound is a bit of a let down, well actually it?s a complete let down because we didn?t hear a thing. Granted the games coding probably takes up a fair chunk of memory but as we know there are things you can do to get around this temporary problem, Ocean Software no doubt got tired towards the end of the day and simply couldn?t be botherd. Tut tut, and this the action of a respected software developer.

Gameplay

Gameplay is of course of a high standard, this was one of those titles you simply must have bought back in the time of it?s original release. The graphics on the back of the box alone would have been enough to convince you, having your ZX Spectrum owning friends around to show the massive power and potential of your shiny new Amstrad CPC. I know that one of my friends simply had to buy a CPC after playing this game as the graphics, speed and yes even the control system worked like a charm.
Out of all the vector based graphcal games on the CPC (there are a few) we would have to say that despite the lack of sound the game does still hold an element of reply value, this is how the current 3D accelerated games of today looked way before they were even thought of - in fact Microsoft was just a little baby back then :)