A good remake of a classic? Or an unbelievably hard disaster?
I’m a new gamer. I only started playing games properly a few years ago. My first console was a Wii. So I’m not used to really difficult games. This generation has been one of hand-holding, easy titles, with frequent checkpoints and auto-saves galore – no bad thing, I might add. The problem arises when a game such as Carrier Command: Gaea Mission comes out. Because that is a damn hard game.
The premise of the game is simple: a little too simple, in fact. You’re the commander of a Carrier (innovative title, right?), a massive storage/battle ship, which can hold 4 Mantas (awesome flying things) and 4 Walruses (tanks which can also act as boats). Due to some old conflict between your faction and the Asia-Pacific Alliance, you have to conquer all of their islands. The plot is weak. Very weak. After a brief introduction by means of a cutscene, the plot is hardly mentioned at all, making it all a bit confusing. But that doesn’t matter. Because you don’t play Carrier Command for plot. I imagine that people would like it because it’s a remake of a game from 1988. I however, don’t feel that sense of nostalgia. So the reasons for me playing are…not really there.
The gameplay is quite complex, and takes a while to appreciate fully. You have to send out Mantas and Walruses to complete objectives and capture the island’s headquarters. You do this from one central control screen, where you can see a map of the island, the positions of all enemies and all of your troops. The interface is fantastic, and very easy to get to grips with – something that I do appreciate, as most RTS games (especially on consoles) have awful UIs – CC excels here. So far, this all sounds very simple, doesn’t it? Here’s the twist: as well as having your units control themselves (which works well, although the AI is rather lacking, often sending your units to the destination via the longest route possible), you can jump in and take control of the unit. This creates a very nice balance of strategy and action elements. My main complaint on this front is that there is little incentive to take control of the units, which meant that I was often just waiting around whilst the AI got them to the needed location.
There are two game modes: Campaign and Strategy. Both are essentially the same, but Strategy lets you customise the game more: choosing the power of your enemies, the requirements for conquest and more. The Strategy mode, though hard, is decent. I can’t say the same thing about the Campaign though.
For some inexplicable reason, the game starts off as a godawful first person shooter. This is for the first 20-30 minutes, and is completely unnecessary. This FPS section is so poor that I almost stopped playing then and there. The zoom animation on the gun is unrealistic and awful. Facial expressions of other players are laughable, as are the voice actors. Putting this level in the game is a mad decision on the part of the designers, as the FPS mechanics didn’t reappear at any point (at least not whilst I was playing). But once you get past this odd diversion, it all gets better. Slightly.
The game is just too hard, and the pacing is really flawed. I sent a couple of Walruses to an objective location on the other side of the map. The terrain was muddy, which inexplicably makes the tanks move slowly. By which I mean, at a snail’s pace. They quite literally crept along, and it took forever for them to get to the objective. At numerous points they got stuck completely, and at one point I had to repeatedly ram into one Walrus by using another to flip it over. It had got stuck on its back. How could these things be allowed into the final game? It’s incredibly frustrating, and does, at times, ruin the game. Worst case scenario, you might have to restart the level. Which is obscene.
Another issue regarding pacing is the waiting around. It happens a lot. Waiting for your units to reach the objective. Waiting for your units to come back to the Carrier so you can go to the next level. Waiting for your Carrier to get to the location for the next level! It’s excruciating, and I often found myself pulling out my phone as a distraction. Not exactly ideal.
More importantly though, the game asks impossible things of you. I had a limited time to get to one place from another. Across mud. Which meant that the units crawled along, so I didn’t get there in time. And this happened again, and again, and again. I think that I was on this one part of a level for almost an hour. I just don’t have the patience to deal with that. It could be because I’m a young gamer, but I think that a lack of accessibility is a flaw with the game itself.
Sadly, there’s more. The game takes so long to play through (with a horrifying amount of restarts) that I didn’t even complete what was referred to as the ‘tutorial’, even though I played for about 6 hours. I reached a point where I was just dying repeatedly, and I called it quits. Quite honestly, I don’t think that I would ever finish this game, no matter how much time I had. It’s just too frustrating. Seeing yourself die again and again is so disheartening, and the fact that the game isn’t that engrossing doesn’t do it any favours.
I think I’d be more impressed if the game didn’t have such a slow, painful start. And this ‘start’ lasts over 5 hours, during which the objectives are simplistic, the enemies are boring and your units are limited. The Strategy mode, which I believe mirrors the later content of the game, is better. More on that later.
Unfortunately, the game fails on other fronts too. It’s very repetitive, even in the (relatively) short time I played. The missions all involve going to one central base, killing things along the way, before hacking the command centre and winning. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get to the command centre only to find out that you actually need to travel halfway across the island to press an arbitrary switch. Logic. The game doesn’t fare much better graphically, either. Cutscenes ran at a very low frame rate (noticeably so), the lip-syncing was incredibly off, and the graphics on the islands are nothing impressive. It doesn’t help that pretty much every island looks the same, so there’s not much variation in environments.
The controls, however, are good. The vehicles control well, including the Mantas (I have a tendency to crash flying objects, yet the Mantas mostly survived!). Like I said before though, there’s little incentive to drive them at all.
And that’s the main issue with Carrier Command: Gaea Mission: it’s just not fun. Maybe it gets better later on in the game. But it’s not worth putting in tedious and frustrating hours for the small possibility that it might get better. Spending hours on levels isn’t the kind of thing I enjoy. Perhaps this game is a love-it or hate-it type thing, although I don’t think it is. It’s missing something crucial to the gaming experience. It’s missing the element of fun.The Strategy mode suffers from many of the same problems, but is better thanks to the pure franticness of the situation. There is a hell of a lot going on, with 4 Mantas and 4 Walruses to worry about, compared with the 1 and 3 I had respectively in the campaign. This mode is ever so slightly addictive, and it is fun to fly around 4 Mantas, shooting everything in sight. It’s still difficult though, and most of my Mantas were shot down within the first 30 seconds. I honestly cannot comprehend why the game is so hard. It just sucks all the life out of it.
THE GOOD
– Can be entertaining to control so many things at once
– Interesting and unique game mechanics
– Intuitive interface
THE BAD
– Too difficult and very frustrating
– Monotonous, lots of waiting around
– Poor graphics and sound
SCORE: 6/10
Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is out now on PC and Xbox 360 (reviewed).
Review copy kindly provided by Premier PR.
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