Beautiful, Bleak, Confusing

"Full 3D Battlefields"

Yes, it really is fully 3D. Using the right mouse button, and a lot of practice, you can swivel all the way around the battlefield, zoom in/out, and rapidly move around using the mini-map. In 3dfx mode, the effects are very attractive … lens flares, colored lighting, and fog/weather effects are some of the nice touches that make it shine. Elevation is readily visible, although it can sometimes be confusing if you're on the other side of a cliff (remember SimCity 2000?). Tiles and textures blend into each other nicely and realistically.

Incendiary Howitzers light up the sky

A power plant goes critical

I wish I could say the same thing about the units. They often look flat, are hard to distinguish from each other, and no matter what armament or chassis, they all blow up exactly the same way. When asked to describe what she thought of the graphics, my wife said, "Looks kind of chauncy." I tend to agree, and not just because I'm married to her. A "full 3D battlefield" sounds really nice, but in reality tends to make the units either too big or too small. Warzone 2100 tends towards the latter, and not in a good way.

Direct3D is decent, but suffers from the loss of some cool explosion stuff and a lot of pixelation. Software mode is just downright ugly -and disconcertingly choppy too.

Anyone for Quake2?

Which brings me to my next major gripe: the color palette sucks! I'm not joking. All those familiar, dingy browns, grays, and smoky, foggy, peppered crap colors are back. The ruined cities are quite grainy looking, and impossible to navigate with all of the gray and black camouflaging your units. The mountain settings are worse, with elevation difficult to distinguish in a never-ending sea of the same crap-colored brown.

Post apocalyptic LA

Somewhere out in the Rockies

There is a snow/arctic tile set which is a little better, but more vibrant colors really would have helped. I understand it's supposed to be a post-nuclear holocaust setting … but I, for one, am tired of the grimy, dingy, worn-out look that's been oh-so-popular in a lot of the sci-fi games of late. I sincerely hope that someday video game artists will get it through their heads that you can use a full, rich color palette and still achieve that dark-and-gloomy future look.

Full-motion-video

To touch on the graphics one last time, Warzone has its fair share of between-mission videos and briefings. To put it bluntly, they are grainy, uninspired, corny, and sometimes downright painful. This is exacerbated by deadpan-monotone voice acting, and repeated use of the same sequence as filler -both of which conspired to quickly wear off any novelty the 3D engine bought.

Couple the videos with a cheesy rip-off plot, and I often wondered if what I was watching was some sort of bizarre joke instead of a game I was supposed to enjoy playing. I am probably being too critical, having no idea what it takes to put together quality computer-animated video. However, in a field of competition with the likes of Blizzard and Westwood, Pumpkin Studios might want to re-think how they approach FMV in the future.