Ground Control II: Multi Player Demo 8.25/10

Ground Control II: Multi Player Demo 8.25/10
Posted :: Jun 23, 2004 by Impact

Screenshots:

Infantry can hide in the trees for a defensive bonus, and make them harder to see. Many infantry coming unannounced from the trees is always hard to deal with.

Capture Landing Zones from enemies to win the game. Some units like the tank in the screen shot have weak armour in the back. Hitting them from both sides makes life difficult for your opponents.

Use your Drop Ship to bring in reinforcements. You can select which landing zone to drop them at.

Grouping different types of units with different strengths can form an extremely effective outpost.

Each race has a scanning unit. Get rid of enemy scanners quickly. Otherwise your army's moves are revealed to your opponent.
Ratings on a scale from 1 (awful) to 10 (amazing):
Gameplay 9/10
- Ground Control II had everything you'd need to comfortably play a real time strategy game from camera rotation, to hotkeys, to unit groups. It doesn't bring anything new to the genre, which is reserved for a full 10 point rating.

Graphics 8/10
- Our computer with a Radeon 9800 was able to smoothly run the Ground Control II demo with full graphic details, 4x FSAA, and 8X Anistropic filtering. This means that Massive Entertainment is not pushing the envelope on the hardware it has available, but they did do an excellent job all else considered.

Sound 7/10 (the final release will probably score higher in this category)
- The tutorial and cut scene voices are well done and the sound effects are appropriate, but the demo does not do anything special with audio. The sound tab in the options menu is greyed out, but this makes us think that perhaps they have something better in store for the final release.

Replay Value 9/10 (Multi Player always will score higher in Replay Value)
- With 3 maps, 2 races, and support for up to 8 different players, the multi player demo should provide quite a few hours of play.

Overall 8.25/10
- I liked the game, it is a solid RTS. If you liked the single player demo, the multi player demo would be right up your alley. The full game is also released today, so it might be worth checking that out.

Links:

Massive Entertainment
Vivendi Universal
Demo Download