Extreme Tactics

Next up in the real-time strategy wars, Extreme Tactics separates itself from the pack of C&C clones with some striking features. Although you're battling to control the fuel on a resource-starved planet, you don't have to fuss with building structures--just the machines of war. Extreme Tactics gives you great control over those machines, allowing you to design every vehicle, choosing its weapons, armor, transport, A.I., and more. Other nice touches include an enemy A.I. that learns and responds and "the biggest maps yet," according to Media Station.

Overview

The Bloodfox and the Hammerhawk are two clans on a dying world. One wishes to use the remaining limited resources to find a new planet, the other feels that they should stay where they are and die with their world. You can choose which clan to play, each one having its own technology trees, and try to overcome the other. One of the really unique features in this real-time strategy game is the ability to design all of your units.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

The single-player game is fun, but not immersive. It feels much more like just a training mission than anything else. The ability to actually design each of your units and pick their weapons configurations, armor, and transportation mode, does add a lot of strategy to this game. However the game lacked the capacity to discern who you were and keep a "profile" for you. Without this, multiple people using the same copy on the same machine share the same unit library, so you almost have to design your units by committee to keep from having too much confusion. It also meant that if you lost a mission, and you hadn't saved it while you were playing that mission, you went back to the first mission and started over. I ended up playing the first three missions for one of the clans several times before I remembered to always save just before I won, so that if I flubbed it on the next mission, I wouldn't have to start all over again.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer game was, unfortunately, unusable. There were so many bugs here that the one time several of my friends and I attempted it, we played for about an hour, got frustrated, and promptly put it away. Most often we ran into two main problems. The first was where one of us could no longer control our units, we could not select them at all -- the units would just stop after they completed their last command and we could not give them new ones. The second was getting into a state where our construction units would not build anything. The build unit would claim to be building, but no units would ever be completed. The countdown would complete, then start over.

Graphics

The graphics really disappointed me. The first thing I noticed was that the line of sight around each unit was always a perfect square. It would have been nice if the attempt had been made to get a line of sight that was more natural, similar to some of the other RTS games out there like Starcraft or Age of Empires.

Audio

The audio was okay, but nothing special. The unit movement sounds were generic, the battle effects sounded canned. Nothing that grabbed me.

System Requirements

Pentium 90 (P120 for multi-player), 16 MB RAM, 30 MB free hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM drive, 640x480 display (256 color or higher), Windows 95, Windows-compatible sound card, Windows-compatible mouse, and a TCP/IP connection for net play

Documentation

Without this, the game is almost unplayable, but the organization of the documentation leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Bottom Line

This game is not one I would really recommend at this point, but I’m hoping for a sequel that will knock my socks off, as the concept of allowing the player to create his or her own unit configuration is extremely appealing to me.