The Looks

Graphics

I think one word could pretty much describe the visual effects in Force Commander: dated. Aside from the great use of fog for dust storms, it was pretty much down hill from there. Weapon graphics consisted of little specks of color darting about. Most of the time the view is very zoomed out so that weapon fire barely even appears. Explosions looked even worse. Every building had the same type of explosion; I think even size of the explosion was the same. They all pretty much consisted of an orange fire flash, which looked good. Then the tail end of the explosion resulted in some badly rendered smoke, and what seemed to be little gray triangles flying outward, I guess that was supposed to be debris.

Lovely Terrain

Artillery Fire

Terrain looked pretty sweet, minus the parts when the horizon got really torn up. All the angles that the camera allowed were not taken into account when making some structures. This was especially bad with the Jawa tent; that had the worst effects I have seen so far in this game. But as far as ground features and skylines went for RTS games it was fairly good.

Most games, when played on great systems, tend to give the player a performance advantage over another system. Force Commander manages to give far more than simply adding smoother game play. If you are playing on a more powerful system you are allowed to reduce the amount of fog, or render distance, that is shown. This would result in greater visibility in area where there is a lot of flat terrain, occasionally giving a direct view across an entire map, depending on terrain. The weaker computer system would not be able to render all the units in the distance, thus giving it a disadvantage.

Another nice horizon

Little Convoy

Menu UI

This has to be one of the most dated parts of the game I have seen. Right after I viewed the intro I was expecting something at least decent. This has to be, by far, one of the worst menu systems I have seen and used. The basic look of the menu system was some attempt at being futuristic and robotic in nature. In this process, they managed to miss the mark on futuristic by a mile while making it quite possibly one of the slowest loading, and bulkiest around.

While navigating the menu is relatively easy, the graphical sequences in between get very tiresome. Clicking on most options in the menu system results in some prolonged transformation process, which then results in the next menu screen. This even occurred while trying to save games. All this even managed to carry over into the menu system that is used while you play the game. I think it's very easy to say these people lost sight of a useful and quick interface the second they started on this path. This might entertain 10-year old kids for five minutes, but even they will grow tired of waiting for the menu to complete its transformation while trying to play the game.

Shields taking hits

Those guys rock

Dud for a HUD

The in game HUD is huge. While the HUD does save you the effort of clicking on a structure for building purposes, one still has to go to that location of the map to either select a deployment area or building spot. One can remove the HUD from the screen, but then some functionality is lost unless all keys are memorized. Thankfully the mini-map can remain up without the command console.