Previous Next

Classy strategy, done the action way

"Review this perplexingly complicated strategy game by tomorrow," the enclosed letter callously threatened. It's 9:37pm. "Great," I thought, "I'm surprised they didn't deliberately send me only half the instructions."

The planet Orion is where we're off to, a planet which you, and up to four other computer or human players, are out to individually conquer. This scrollable planet is divided up into individual countries with each player starting in a separate one, possibly casting up distant memories of some kind of war game. For your first few turns, the general game strategy will consist of building a factory, coming up with a cyborg or two, and then moving these cyborgs to take over and set up government in adjacent countries.

Take the next few turns to increase your empire - as everything costs money ensure to take over some cities to reap in extra cash, and also a few rural countries where you can start up new factories to build up your cyborg force ready to attack. Up to this point there will be little chance that you'll have been attacked by the opposition so perhaps now would be a good time for you to make an attack.

Unless 'Fog of War' mode is previously turned off. Steel Empire doesn't let you see any off the enemy icons - that's to say their factories, cyborgs, or defences - on your turn, so unless you have an extremely good memory you can't just jump on in there and attack. A spy will have to be sent in first. If there are no enemy cyborgs about then you can take over a country simply by moving one of yours in, else you'll have to fight it out head-to-head against your opponent.

To be brief, the battle sequences take the form of a fight to the death match via a split screen scrolling overhead view arrangement with your cyborgs at one end, the enemy's at the other and appropriate scenery in between. The basic strategy involves moving forward and shooting the enemy by various means - you move one cyborg at a time whilst the others move and shoot by themselves. Although this may seem like a good idea, it's quite possible to win or lose without personally actually doing anything - I have played games where you've felt more involved in the action.

Well, even though size isn't strictly important, that's still about the size of it. The graphics are really what you'd come to expect of this sort of thing - pretty boring but adequate - and the sound is a bit rubbish too, including some highly dubious Mega Lo Mania-style speech samples. The gameplay is a bit more tricky to voice opinion on however. The blend of strategy and shoot-'em-up work well creating what initially seems like a reasonably enjoyable Amiga full price game.

But the problem is that you get to see everything on your first go - the one planet to conquer, the five shoot-'em-up terrains - so the excitement of exploration is completely lost. Even though it will take a long time to become a good player, Mr and Mrs Bored may well be round for tea in the meanwhile, if you know what I mean.

An enjoyable futuristic war game, but a little too thin for comfort. More worlds to conquer and some extra features would have been nice.