![]() At times, it does look fantastic and can blow you away. Then you’ve got the intricate detail on the ships, with thrusters blaring and trail-blazing along the surface and shiny colours flickering all around as you go to battle. In some cases, stunningly so, like the textured surface of Pluto’s planet surface is really silky smooth and the shadow effects are clean and well rounded, genuinely giving this game a modern feel. The difference really is night and day, and while some elements have been tweaked and rebalanced, the main take away is that the visuals have been massively overhauled for 4K resolution support, complete with modern rendering and shaders. But there’s also a lot of in-game content to talk about as well, including the revamped visual style which Big Boat Interactive deserve a lot of credit for. The process is seamless and is a lovely homage to the story behind this long-awaited remake.įor many people, that’s probably all they’re going to need to know about Battlezone Combat Commander as the very idea of modding the game has been a long time coming. While we obviously haven’t been able to dive in on that as we played the game pre-launch, it’s easy to select a mod, activate and deactivate it, and even make your own. There’s an entire section dedicated to mods now which synchronizes with Steam Workshop, a modders heaven, and can be pulled up from the main menu. ![]() Naturally, Rebellion have ensured the spirit of that is maintained in the long-awaited remaster, Battlezone: Combat Commander. And so from the ashes of its original community, a more substantial, constructive one emerged which sort of laid the foundations for the extensive scene we have today. Battlezone 2 actually became one of the first games to ever receive such a high level of support from outside of its development team. Here’s the thing, though, Battlezone 2 had a more important role to play in the grand scheme of things because it unwittingly spurred on modders to unofficially tweak the game in order to get the best out of it. This extremely niche community started turning in on itself and it all imploded pretty fast. Sadly, it ended up killing the franchise dead for many years as the game was both a hog that could melt most GFX cards into a micro-chippy puddle, but it also came riddled with bugs that were never properly patched out of the box. ![]() But despite the success of the original, the problems really started with Battlezone 2 being a bit too ambitious for the time. So on paper, Battlezone probably sounded like a hot mess, but Pandemic Studios genuinely pulled it off, finding some effective common ground that suited both sets of audiences, creating a fun and lasting experience to boot. At that point, it’s fair to say the industry was all-in. In two years we saw Half Life to Delta Force, Unreal Tournament, Kingpin, and the exceptionally rare Wheel of Time. Some studios seemed to think RTS was in decline and its glory days were done, whereas FPS had everything left to offer. The hybrid was a big risk for the time as both genres were at very different stages of popularity. ![]() It truly was a golden decade of development where some of the most wild and wacky experiments emerged, like Battlezone, an FPS RTS which is the predecessor for Battlezone: Combat Commander.
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