Ground Control II: Single Player Demo 7.75/10

Ground Control II: Single Player Demo 7.75/10
Posted :: Jun 2, 2004 by Haggs

Ground Control II: Single Player Demo
Release Date: June 22, 2004
Publisher: Vivendi Universal
Producer: Massive Entertainment
Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS)

If you had a chance to try the Soldiers: Heroes of World War II demo and enjoyed that, then you should definitely check out the Ground Control II: Operation Exodus single player demo too. They are both similar, apart from the fact that Soldiers takes place during World War II, and Ground Control II takes place far into the future (the year 2741 to be more precise). In the single player demo you follow the story of Captain Jacob Angelus who dives head first into the battle between the North Star Alliance and the Terran Empire. Yes, unlike in Starcraft and many other Sci-Fi games, we're not cheering for the Terrans this time.

Ground Control II is a real time strategy game that takes into account such things as terrain height advantages, forest defense bonuses, and vehicle weak points. Infantry can also capture buildings and use them for added cover when firing upon enemies strolling by in the open. Massive Entertainment also did a wonderful job making Ground Control II easy and comfortable to play by allowing players to use hotkeys, formations, and unit groups of up to 16 units. They also made use of the Alt key to bring up all units' health bars to keep track of which units (friend and foe alike) are weak and need of repairs.

Basic game play involves using your army to capture landing zones so drop ships can come bring reinforcements at the cost of acquisition points. Acquisition points are gained by killing enemy troops or buildings and holding landing zones and victory locations. Once the set of mission objectives is complete, you complete your mission and move on to the next one.

The vegetation graphics aren't anything to ooh and ahh about, but they did a very nice job with the water effects (despite the amazing, unrealistic transparent water clarity). The rest of the units, buildings, turrets, and explosion effects, aren't anything special. I was able to use the highest graphics settings, 4x FSAA, and 8x anisotropic filtering and the game ran at a comfortably smooth frame rate on our Radeon 9800. This means that a wide variety of gamers should be able to experience Ground Control II without slow downs or obnoxiously low frame rates. It was rather amusing that the first time the game ran, a popup message said that the motherboard drivers may need updating or game play would suffer. The game had no problems running the game whatsoever.

I concluded that the 187 MB download was well worth the wait time, and anxiously await the full release to try out some multiplayer action. If Ground Control II sounds appealing to you, I'd encourage you to give the demo for a try and come back with some comments on how it went.