Field Commander
The apocalypse is nigh: a fantastic strategy game has been released for the PSP.
Published: May 22, 2006
Someone at Sony Online Entertainment deserves a pat on the back. The obvious research and planning that went into making Field Commander one of the best games on the PSP has paid off in spades. Things like balance and difficulty and unit variety -- all of these things seem guided by a master hand, and the result is the first true strategy game that's on the level of something like Advance Wars on our good game-starved PlayStation Portables.
Field Commander is deceptively simple. The storyline, which revolves around trrststststsss with a ton of moolah deciding they've had it with organized government sometime in the near future gives the game a semi-realistic setting. Pointy ears and magicks, the stuff that SOE has become known for, are nowhere to be found. This means your so-rad-it-doesn't-exist hush-hush military force is built from things like subs and planes and tanks, and it doesn't require a lot of investment to understand.
See, you're part of ATLAS (the Advanced Tactical Legion for Allied Security), and you don't exist. When you napalm a while swatch of forest to wipe out some embedded tanks on foreign soil, the local constabularies will happily take credit for your anti-terror carpet bombing actions. This means you can gun down bad guys at will without ever having to worry about answering to anyone save for the allied governments that write your paycheck. And so long as you kill 'em all dead, they'll keep writing.
The whole RTS model has been stripped down into something that feels uniquely at home on a portable. For starters, it's turn-based, allowing you to play short sessions on the can or while riding the bus just as Sony imagined, but it's also about simple displays of power. A tank going up against a foot solider will give you obvious results -- even with adjacent units always counter-attacking. When coupled with fights that can take place on land, sea and air at the same time (though this doesn't happen until you've been slowly eased into the game), it's an additive mix that delivers the much-vaunted "just one more mission" gameplay that developers are always striving to hit.
What's amazing is that the game is incredibly well balanced right from the start, even with 30+ different (and frankly unique) units to manage. Part of this comes from both sides having the same basic units, but things like resource management has been boiled down to a very simple mechanic: building equal cash. Send a ground troop into an empty building and they'll start to capture it. The amount of health they have vs. the amount of total health of the building determines how many turns it'll take to capture the building. When you finally do, payday is a little more rewarding. Because there are a fixed number of buildings, individual troops become as important as sending in a raft of forces to bum rush the enemy base.
And even this isn't something that's done with reckless abandon. The maps are typically rather small, and troop movement isn't that great, though obviously vehicles and aircraft do better than someone on foot. This too is balanced by giving vehicles limited ammo and gas, which can be restocked by simply resting on a captured building for a turn. This is further balanced by giving some units primary and secondary weapons, and distilled further by making sure that only a select few can attack from long range. Those that do attack at long range can't move later.
Field Commander is deceptively simple. The storyline, which revolves around trrststststsss with a ton of moolah deciding they've had it with organized government sometime in the near future gives the game a semi-realistic setting. Pointy ears and magicks, the stuff that SOE has become known for, are nowhere to be found. This means your so-rad-it-doesn't-exist hush-hush military force is built from things like subs and planes and tanks, and it doesn't require a lot of investment to understand.
See, you're part of ATLAS (the Advanced Tactical Legion for Allied Security), and you don't exist. When you napalm a while swatch of forest to wipe out some embedded tanks on foreign soil, the local constabularies will happily take credit for your anti-terror carpet bombing actions. This means you can gun down bad guys at will without ever having to worry about answering to anyone save for the allied governments that write your paycheck. And so long as you kill 'em all dead, they'll keep writing.
The whole RTS model has been stripped down into something that feels uniquely at home on a portable. For starters, it's turn-based, allowing you to play short sessions on the can or while riding the bus just as Sony imagined, but it's also about simple displays of power. A tank going up against a foot solider will give you obvious results -- even with adjacent units always counter-attacking. When coupled with fights that can take place on land, sea and air at the same time (though this doesn't happen until you've been slowly eased into the game), it's an additive mix that delivers the much-vaunted "just one more mission" gameplay that developers are always striving to hit.
What's amazing is that the game is incredibly well balanced right from the start, even with 30+ different (and frankly unique) units to manage. Part of this comes from both sides having the same basic units, but things like resource management has been boiled down to a very simple mechanic: building equal cash. Send a ground troop into an empty building and they'll start to capture it. The amount of health they have vs. the amount of total health of the building determines how many turns it'll take to capture the building. When you finally do, payday is a little more rewarding. Because there are a fixed number of buildings, individual troops become as important as sending in a raft of forces to bum rush the enemy base.
And even this isn't something that's done with reckless abandon. The maps are typically rather small, and troop movement isn't that great, though obviously vehicles and aircraft do better than someone on foot. This too is balanced by giving vehicles limited ammo and gas, which can be restocked by simply resting on a captured building for a turn. This is further balanced by giving some units primary and secondary weapons, and distilled further by making sure that only a select few can attack from long range. Those that do attack at long range can't move later.
