Goblin Commander: Unleash the Horde
- November 06, 2003 00:00 AM PST
The console RTS by fraternal Blizzard veterans nears completion. Is the horde ready?
Hark! The Horde Approaches� Is it really possible to make a console RTS that isn�t a nightmare tangle of controller clunk? If the recent PS2 build of Goblin Commander (it�s also coming for the Xbox and GameCube) is any indication, the answer is most definitely yes. In this ambitious attempt at rewriting the RTS rules (see �The Battle for Real Time,� page 60, July), setting waypoints and patrols is effortless, and the intuitive �one button per clan� scheme requires almost no learning curve. The game�s nifty method of possessing (and directly controlling) units keeps you constantly busy, and the single-player campaign makes the normally tedious RTS build-up phase a lot more fun�instead of watching some peons gather lumber for five minutes, you�re smashing stuff yourself and personally hunting down roving packs of enemies with complete camera control.Once you�ve broken enough stuff and killed enough to fill up your gold and soul banks a bit, you�ll find yourself switching more often to the more traditional Commander mode, wrangling three clans and as many Titans at a pretty furious pace from on high. Only a couple quibbles so far: The advanced option to set �home points� on the map could be handled a little better�adding a new home point clears all the others, so you have to redo them all from the start, and while there�s a �warp to conflict� key assignment, there�s no way to directly warp to a wayward Titan or group of units.
Gather �Round, Gather �Round The single-player campaign works you through the learning curve slowly; it picks up steam about halfway through, once you�ve acquired a couple clans and a couple Titans with which to play and strategize. Instant gratification comes by way of the two-player split-screen multiplayer skirmishes (sorry, no online�at least for this game), which let you start off with any three of the five clans and their Titans right from the start. Ground is gained and lost at a furious back-and-forth pace�it can take dozens of mini-battles and tons of 10-man Goblin troops just to hold on to a piece of ground. It�s likely to wind up being the game�s best feature, and it feels like the successor to an old (and extremely underappreciated) Genesis game called Herzog Zwei.
The Stained Ones Goblin Commander may not turn out to be the most graphically impressive game ever wrought (there�s still some jumpy animation and critical optimization to be done), but fun games are about a lot more than pretty pictures. Its greatest potential is as an awesome two-player living-room rallying point. All the Horde has to do now is shake that damnable console RTS stigma.
