Mighty Shoes to Fill

Developer: Pandemic
Publisher: Activision
Official BZ2 Website: http://www.pandemicstudios.com/bzii/index.htm

FPS, RTS or FRPTSS?

Most games can be thrown into a particular genre. Quake 3 without a doubt falls into the first person shooter. Starcraft gets lumped in with the real time strategy games. Battlezone II… that's a bit harder. BZII attempts to combine the first person shooter with elements of real time strategy mixed in. So what is it then, FPS or RTS? The player gets to create a base and maintain it (RTS), while fighting with the troops on the frontline (FPS). Initially I thought the game would be a third rate attempt to combine the genres. After giving BZ II a little playtime, it seemed that the developers had done this rather successfully. They seem to have married the two genres and created something quite interesting. The single player did not catch my attention too much however; I was too busy imagining the multi-player possibilities. While the game turned out fine, it had some issues that kept it from being a real must-play type of game.

The Menu

Pretty Eh?

The colors man, the colors.

I think the word impressive would describe this game adequately on many levels, particularly system requirements. I have rarely played a game that killed my computer because of the strain it created. I had a TNT2 in my system and found out quickly that I would need a bit more power to keep this game running. Even while playing with a GeForce SDR, I had trouble attaining a playable frame rate with high quality settings turned on. Frame rates were pretty darn sluggish for what I consider to be a moderately powerful computer, a 450MHz/128 MB RAM setup. Stability was a definite issue as well; fatal errors were not uncommon. In an attempt to determine if the crashing was out of the ordinary, we checked the BZ2 message boards about stability issues. Almost every other topic had someone ranting about problems; whether it was about joysticks or graphics, the populace was not pleased.

Gotta love those trees

Incoming!