First Impressions:

Graphics:

Because Force Commander is a true 3-D rendered game, I'm combining Graphics and User Interface (UI) together into one category. Essentially, they become the same thing as the player attempts to navigate and control the play area on the x, y, and z. Considering the effort that LucasArts put into making the product a 3-D game, it is a shame that it actually makes the game much worse than what it would have been otherwise.

The cardinal sin of Force Commander is that the UI is not only useless, but becomes a major hindrance to playing the game. Creating an UI for a 3-D environment is one of the hardest set of problems to solve in game design. Unfortunately, Force Commander serves as a textbook example of all the things not to do when creating a UI. The camera is completely uncontrollable, rides a fixed distance off the ground (meaning it rides up and down hills when moving it) and really is best when left stationary. The unit markers are hideous blue boxes that visually clutter and confuse the play area. To make matters worse, selecting units becomes a hassle due to overlap and movement. The enemy AI is only a minor nuisance compared to actually controlling each unit and organizing your forces. The only way to play Force Commander is to quickly memorize the hotkeys and to drop the BHCI Interface (menu bar), which you'll need to do anyway as most of the UI isn't represented visually by buttons. The advantage to dropping the menu bar is that it opens up the 3-D view to full screen. If ever a game was in need of an UI focus group, this game was it.

Ok, ok, enough about the UI, how pretty is the game? Well frankly, not very. One of the traits of the Star Wars films is that most of the settings are fairly dramatic. Despite whatever location was being filmed on, it became an interesting place. Force Commander attempts to recreate several of these locations, yet utterly fails. The basic problem is that no matter what world you are playing on (Hoth, Tattooine, etc.), the landscape looks utterly bland and without depth. It's like a set being lit with low-powered floodlights: everything is kind of grayish and flat (and that was on a Matrox G400 Max, which makes D3D come to life.) When the detail and resolution was turned all the way up (from normal), the effect was hardly noticeable. The feeling of immersion was shaky due to the texture sizes being too small and too repetitive on the terrain: the layout grid could clearly be seen well before taking the camera out to its max distance.

What about the models and units? I'm glad you asked. They were just as bland as the landscape. The animation was jerky and lifeless and the poly-count so low that you could cut yourself if you weren't careful (watching Stormtroopers run is good for a couple of laughs.) To add insult to injury, the new unit designs, the unit portraits, and the 2D part of the UI were so ugly they made my eyes hurt… no really, even the text was nearly unreadable. The impression which the graphics deliver is "half-assed." It seems something went wrong between concept and implementation with the end result seeming to be very modest and uninspired.

Sound/Music:

Have you ever heard a sound so utterly awful that you assumed it was a joke and the real music would start following it? I did with the soundtrack on Force Commander. For a moment, I thought the disco-jazzy-whatever version of the Imperial March might be an interesting pre-mission setup. But it didn't stop, in fact, it got worse once the missions started. There are times when "something" different is a very bad idea. This was one of them. Occasionally, a totally out of place Rob Zombie-ish riff would start up and go away… just to tease me some.

As bad as the soundtrack was, the worse was yet to come. The unit acknowledgement sounds may be the most uncreative set ever produced for a game. They aren't funny, they aren't good, there aren't very many of them (which multiplies the annoyance factor) and they weren't very helpful. The English accent was way overplayed and came off more as a parody than mirroring the movies (which used English accents for the Empire and Midwestern for the Rebels.) Somehow, the voice-overs and scripts missed the entire attitude and feel of the Star Wars universe.

The combat sounds were mostly adequate with the exception that the sounds didn't reinforce what was going on in the game very well (a la Total Annihilation). I made the mistake of having a squadron of Tie Fighters patrol near my base once… after a few moments of pure noise, I moved them out somewhere too far away to hear.

Gameplay:

Had the implementation of the graphics and sound been inspired, then the game would still have been a disaster due to the game play. As in most Star Wars-based game products so far, the single player game in Force Commander is centered on a story line. The problem is that the storyline isn't interesting and it doesn't pull you in. The gist is that you play a character who's military career is skyrocketing in the Empire and you drag your geek brother from place to place to achieve the missions (he's a hot computer specialist.) The missions themselves are scripted, though the logic of the situation rarely makes sense. A good example is from a mission where the goal was to set up a continuous line of relay towers to connect two spots on the map. The idea is that data needs to be moved from one spot to another so that it can be beamed up to orbit through a satellite relay. Of course, while you are setting up the towers, reinforcements are being delivered from orbit via shuttles… anybody see a logic problem here? Apparently the Empire can't squeeze data into an R2 unit like the Rebels can or consider hard drives passe. Effectively, the missions are about cleaning up scattered groups of resistance over the map and beating off half-hearted attacks. The end result is a tired sequence of missions that any RTS gamer would have already done a thousand times, though not nearly as fun. Even the pure skirmish mode (usually better than regular missions in RTS games) was just plain boring.

Here are some of the game play-killing problems: The enemy AI is one of the dumbest seen in a recent RTS. It consistently dribbles attacks at the player, allowing its forces to be chewed up without reacting in any noticeable way. The resource system is a bit odd. Basically, command points are awarded for killing the enemy. Then the player can spend those command points for reinforcements. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to launch a hard, overpowering attack (isn't that what the Star Destroyers were built for?) and the combat breaks into an attrition based back-and-forth skirmish. The path finding is atrocious (even with the very simple, spacey maps created for missions). Units have a very difficult time moving from one spot to another. Often, a unit would get stuck behind a building that seemed to have plenty of clearance. LOS (line of sight) was a joke: units regularly shot through buildings, yet couldn't hit an enemy unit on top of a hill (and weren't intelligent enough to either report in or move to a new location.) Several times throughout the game, I had to delete units that were stuck on the map and often had to navigate them around buildings. Perhaps the biggest problem with the game play was the inability to place buildings on perfectly flat and clear places on the landscape. Ordering, then placing a building was a major chore of finding the "sweet spot" on the map. With a base of any size at all, this meant playing a puzzle game with new buildings and reinforcement drops.

The real sin in game play is that I worked very hard to get through the missions as fast as possible… so that I could get them over with and end the suffering. It's obvious that Force Commander borrowed from the War/StarCraft series and Command and Conquer, but they couldn't quite pull out a clear, compelling style from the pieces. I do have to give the designers credit for trying some ideas that aren't normally associated with RTS games, such as implementing experience on a per unit basis.

Enjoyment:

Playing Force Commander was a very negative experience. The entire time spent playing the game was not only wasted, but I was steaming over having spent $50 on it. If you know people who are even considering buying the game, beg them, plead with them, to reconsider.

Multiplayer:

Why bother?

Overall Impression:

Vietnam in space. It felt like a quagmire of a conflict that was not worth winning and forced the kind of fight that no military commander wants to face. The fact that Force Commander is set in the Star Wars universe magnifies the problems and leads to a much bigger fall. I have no doubt that the game design looked good on paper and the project got off to a great start, but in the end the implementation suffered. The production values are a solid "average" across the board; nothing stands out as being well done and the UI destroys what potential there was. The sad part is, I am leaving out most of the problems in order to keep the review to a decent length. The only positive part of the game experience was that it did not crash or lock up at any time.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

So, how appealing is this game to women gamers? That's a tough question. It really depends on her overall enjoyment of RTS games and fan level of the Star Wars universe. Outside of the generic Star Wars factor, it seems unlikely that the product would appeal to a larger segment of female gamers than any other RTS game. Force Commander does include more females as unit portraits and VOs (transportation, not combatants) which is more than what is found in the movies (outside of the heroes), but not as progressive as StarCraft's expansion set.