Carrier Command 2 review: all lost in a row

I’m bad at Carrier Command 2. Most of us will be at first. There is a little solace in there. Its very concept depends on the fact that there is a lot to deal with, and a big part of its challenge comes from having to deal with that. A good part of the satisfaction comes from mastering all of its parts, both discreetly and in combination. But after playing for several days, I’m still far from being an expert. I doubt I will ever be.

And it’s good. But I think this is a bit too short of its potential as a single player game to fully convince me.

The idea is convincing enough to be frustrating that it has been so rarely revisited since the 1988 original. find dozens of islands, each defended by AI vehicles and turrets hostile to the two aircraft carriers, and each houses a base which, if captured, can craft replacement vehicles, weapons, and supplies. You of course control a transporter, with the freedom to attack where and how you see fit.

Strategically, anyway. In practice, what you’re going to do is flip switches, watch through binoculars, and turn off monitors you aren’t using because you’re energy conscious, then forget which one does what when you need to. new need, because you are also an idiot. It’s, like last week’s HighFleet, big on diagetic interfaces, although as with this game, reasonable concessions are made when it comes to the action sections. Because, you see, you’re not just pushing icons across the map or watching helplessly from the deck at another helicopter bumping straight into an oncoming missile. No, whenever your drone vehicles are off the ship, you can connect to them remotely, either to passively supervise and spot from a spinning reconnaissance ship, or to actively take control and crash into as many missiles as you like.

“Playing Carrier Command 2 is pretty easy. Playing with any level of skill, however, is a whole other matter altogether.”

However, this is not the first action interpretation of Carrier Command’s other Hostile Waters descendant. Most of your job will be coordinating, planning, and fine-tuning the controls, and when you get behind the wheel, you’ll be greeted with a simulation worthy of the original. Ground vehicles are fairly straightforward (and amphibious, the only time Hostile Waters was actually much trickier) to deal with, although you still need to be careful of the telemetry reading once it’s tank time. if you want those shots to count. Airplanes, however, are a game in themselves and possibly the biggest obstacle for anyone who wants to dive.

This is not a game you get into. Between a reasonable tutorial and help menu, and experience with similar games, I quickly felt right at home. Playing Carrier Command 2 is quite easy. Playing with any level of skill, however, is a whole different matter.

It didn’t take me long to spot and fire on most of the aircraft carrier’s big gun defenses, unwilling to trust air units with little sense of self-preservation or initiative, and not wanting to wait for buggies and tanks to slowly crawl to beaches only. immediately run out of ammo and have to come back.

This is when a player who is comfortable with a helicopter or a jet would shine, of course, but I never really got to know any of the planes. They are uncomfortably manipulated via the keyboard, the mouse being entirely reserved for the camera (and even then only if you have a camera module installed), and I felt the lack of analog controls even though I used my controller precisely. zero times in the last 18 months. Giving orders on the map, meanwhile, is understandably awkward on a controller, and while the game detects back-and-forth quite well, there has always been too much friction to make me feel confident flying. , except the most careful flights.

Dealing with the parts of a vehicle you control also takes some getting used to and is easily groped under pressure. You can use steering, or all independently installed mods and weapons, but to control both at once you have to turn them on manually and then return to steering. Coming back from remote mode, everything reverts back to controlling the AI, after which you will need to reset everything to get it back on track if you resume, and in the meantime, that vehicle will also have started to return to the waypoint you did. drove two minutes ago rather than the next. As far as I know in fact, you cannot delete waypoints at all, or even issue a stop / cancel order, a minor issue made worse by the difficulty of selecting a unit or waypoint from among a group of them without awkwardly zooming the map impractically up close.

In fact, ground vehicles have a slight habit of grouping together when launched, and each must be controlled individually by clicking and dragging lines on the map. The fastest full deployment is clicking 8 buttons, then waiting for them all to launch, then zooming in to click each one, then zooming out to set the waypoint where you actually need it, then zoom in to click on the next vehicle. .. during this time you also have up to 8 planes to launch and give orders, lest they take off when you are distracted and go stupidly towards the horizon until they run out. fuel or notice where they have gone. And you also have to order this fuel and go through the binoculars to spot a new enemy, and check the supply line so that the barge network still delivers ammo and chassis replacement, and place an order at a factory, and damn their ships have spotted us, so you’ll have to use the torpedo tubes as well.

Hope you have memorized your compass bearings, as they are not displayed anywhere near the torpedo station. Oh speaking of that, the artillery tank is no longer in S3 bay, it docked at S5 during the last rearmament and now you’ve launched the wrong one. You should have gone to the other side of the bridge to check! No, you cannot reassign them manually. And you really should check the radar again as there are no audio notifications for most things and we never sunk that last boat.

I could cite a few small complaints, but that would miss the point. The real difficulty I have is that it’s way too much for one person to handle all of this. Even if I was an elite pilot rather than the … I don’t know, maybe I am a six-core pilot, every time I flew I would neglect everything else. And maybe I keep biting more than I can chew, but every time I go on small exits to safely prune an island, it’s time the enemy aircraft carrier will spend taking it. of them. I fully understand that rotating the plates is the whole point of the design, but that’s just too much for me. And once, I did really well at a job where I had 21 inboxes and managed a system to coordinate a dozen departments in addition to my official job.

But I enjoyed it. Aside from a few bad layout decisions, redundant monitors on the port side, and chairs getting in the way, I love to walk around my deck. The ocean gets ridiculously choppy, the rain and dusk are beautiful, and the music is slightly reminiscent of Deus Ex. Although it leans towards simulation rather than action, Carrier Command is much less complicated than a game. dedicated flight, and although the small guns are a bit dull, the cannon and missile strikes are fine. I especially love how the scenery will light up as the rocket trail of a cruise missile approaches, and I love that when you give a launch order you can then run into the bays to watch The automated crane will lift your bomber and put it into place. on the lift for take off. However, I would like there to be more turrets dedicated to manual control. Hell, I’d just pull out an RPG and aim off the bridge when someone gets too close. But it’s up to me not to have a helicopter as an escort, I guess.

It’s clear that even if my complaints are corrected or if I just reorganize my brain enough to ignore them completely, Carrier Command 2 has a high skill cap. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have enough time to devote to it, but I’ll definitely be playing it a bit more, which says a lot about any game that takes as much time as a bare minimum. And there is one thing that is obvious: Carrier Command 2 is going to shine in co-op.

He’ll need a group of like-minded friends to enjoy several minutes of someone steering the ship to the next island as much as sharing a tank seat, as well as dividing the AI ​​defenses with it. a scout helicopter to keep the flak out of the arriving jet bomber. This is also where the charming but completely unused interior of the ship comes into its own, as five or six friends agree on a house rule that you must get to your bunk while you are afk, and can only be called back to the bridge if someone up there activates the alarm. I can already see myself patrolling the hallways, grumbling obsessively that left the lights on. I have already stolen the elevator pitch “Sea Of Theives crossed with Arma” from Sam Greer, and I have solicited several friends for potential hijackings.

I would be one of the first to say “but it’s fine in co-op” doesn’t count for most games, as most things are better with a friend, but that’s definitely the one claiming it, and the developers Geometa certainly seem to be aware of this judging by the custom play option to have 4 sides and up to 64 simultaneous players. I can see the potential for more game modes too (definitely some sort of training ground for test flights and the like would be welcome), but I have to trust what’s here, and well that I enjoy a good stretch, which is here just feels outside of my reach.