I ‘ve been on a real RTS binge lately, and I lay all of the blame on Red Conquest ‘s 1.1 update. Although several of the new campaign missions highlight some of the major weaknesses in the game ‘s controls, the experience is still some of the most fun I ‘ve had in an RTS on any platform. Heck, even the story made more sense this time around.
I won ‘t re-review the whole game for this update since the controls are still very much the same (and as complicated as ever), but the new playable faction is different enough to warrant a few (hundred) words. If I had to put it in Starcraftian terms, the Red faction from the first game played like the Zerg, and the Blues that you take control of this time around are more like the Terrans. They don ‘t heal automatically (there are medic ships for that), but they do have a greater variety of units, and there ‘s a lot more personality to this human group than the space bed bugs that make up the Red army.
One thing that I found impressive was how epic the whole campaign felt, despite being composed of just eight missions. The gameplay is still leagues ahead of the cutscenes, but the story really started to come together in this second portion of the trilogy, and I ‘m genuinely interested in seeing how this saga plays out. This doesn ‘t feel like an update for the sake of appeasing a hungry App Store audience ” Red Conquest 1.1 feels like a genuine expansion pack that game owners happened to get for free.
The only complaint I have about the new campaign is the last mission, which requires you to escape from an overwhelming enemy force. I played almost all of the missions on normal mode, but I had to set the difficulty down to easy just to survive. It also felt a little anti-climactic to finish the chapter with my tail between my legs, but such is usually the fate of in-between chapters (people said the same thing about Mass Effect 2).
Third Installment
I have high hopes for the third chapter of the Conquest trilogy, and I hope it can bring with it a slight improvement in the control scheme. I ‘m sure part of the problem is how much I suck at RTS titles, but it ‘s also still far too difficult to manage different groups of units in different places on the map. The best that I could manage at any one time was to have a base and an attack force. It always felt too clumsy to try to direct two different groups, since you can ‘t save unit selections into groups.
However, combat was still incredible fun thanks to the excellent formation implementation. The game is great at making you feel like a master tactician as your swarm of units expertly breaks wall formation and swams all of the enemy units on-screen ” all at the touch of a button.
Multiplayer Lobby
I ‘d still very much like to try a multiplayer match out, but I haven ‘t found anybody to play with eve two days into the udpate.
Hah. About one minute after typing that I found exactly one player to play with, and we tried three matches out. The first went very well because 1) I managed to win and 2) there was no lag at all. The second and third matches were terrible because I lost and the lag was horrific (ships teleporting all over teh place). So I can confirm that the multiplayer lobby is a lot of fun when it works, but is, unfortunately, still quite buggy and laggy and disconnection-prone.
The multiplayer options are bountiful, though ” as is the selection of maps. No Command and Conquer separate DLC map pack here, because everything comes with the game. As it should.
If Kooistra and company can get the servers working again, I ‘ll definitely be back for more multiplayer action. I ‘m really amazed at how much Red Conquest doesn ‘t look or play like a mobile title (there ‘s even text chat in the lobby!), and I really hope more people pick it up. It really is one of the best titles on the App Store, and certainly my favourite RTS on the iPhone.
[If this has whetted your appetite for strategy on the iPhone, the game is still on sale for $1.99.]
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TAGS: iphone game, RTS
