Z
        A Strategy/War Game from The Bitmap Brothers
                PC CD-ROM, Cost: around œ30

                  Review by James Jillians

   Minimum requirements: 486DX2 66MHz, 8 Mb RAM, CD ROM,
                       VGA Video Card


No storyline is given for Z, which is far preferable to some utter
nonsense about Zordad the Unholy enslaving the population of the
galaxy with his evil cyborgs, and it being up to you, as the only
human immune to his mind-altering drugs, to save it. In fact, the
only background supplied is that as commander of an army of
robots, you must conquer five planets held by enemy robots.

Each of the five planets is divided into four battlefields, so the
game is really just a string of twenty battles taken one at a time
until you finally achieve total victory.

A battle starts with your small team of red robots (about 8)
gathered around a fort at one end of the battleground; at the
other end is the computer's blue force of similar robots and a
fort like yours. The battlefield is divided into territories,
numbering anything between 9 and 20 depending on the level you
have reached. Your view is from above and scrolls around to show
small portions of the battlefield at a time. Each territory
contains a flag which can be captured to give you possession of
any useful factories, radar stations or robot repair facilities
that are built there. The battle is only won when you gather a
large enough force to wipe out your opponent's entire army or to
destroy his fort, either by going inside and planting a bomb or
simply blasting away at it from the outside.

On the earlier levels your force consists entirely of the basic
soldier unit - "Grunts", armed with a puny rifle, and who frankly
aren't much use against anything other than more Grunts.
Fortunately, that's all your opponent has too. Moving your "elite"
brigade couldn't be easier - all you have to do is click on the
company of three or so robots you wish to move and then click on a
destination. If this is a flag, they capture it; if it's an enemy
unit, they attack; if it's an impassable bit of scenery, they try
to destroy it.

The landscape is dotted with various obstacles that your soldiers
must pass - rivers, which can only be crossed using demolishable
bridges, walls, which can be destroyed with boxes of grenades
lying around and gorges which you must find a way round. The best
idea initially is to capture territories containing factories in
order to build new units to launch against your opponent. You can
opt for more Grunts, various types of gun emplacements to defend
your territory or try some more powerful robots - Psychos armed
with machine guns, Toughs armed with rocket launchers, Snipers who
can shoot their rifles further and move faster, Pyros with
flame-throwers or Laser units armed with Star Wars style laser
guns. You can also manufacture vehicles such as jeeps, three sizes
of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and mobile missile launchers
which all come complete with a Grunt driver. At the start of a
battle there are usually some of these vehicles scattered around
which can be captured by units in the same way as you capture
flags. More powerful units are not available until the later
levels - a few more become manufacturable each time you win a
game.

While you capture territories and build up your forces, your
opponent is doing exactly the same thing on his side of the board.
As the game is played out in real time rather than turns, the
earlier stages of each battle are a race to get the most
territories and build the most units. It is important to capture
as many territories as possible as the speed at which new units
are manufactured is proportional to the number of territories
under your control.

Fights between units occur regularly, and you can see them
exchange shots until one of the combatants (usually the weaker) is
destroyed. Each unit has an energy bar which is depleted in combat
making veterans more easily destroyed in the future. Units can be
ganged together into groups which is usually a good tactic for
destroying a strong unit with weaker ones.

Z is a very tactical game. Do you leave one area relatively
defenceless in order to launch an attack, and hopefully reach the
enemy fort before he reaches yours? Do you risk attacking or fall
back and gather a stronger force, perhaps losing a valuable
territory? What sort of unit is best used to attack particular
types of enemy? A mobile missile launcher may be perfect for
destroying tanks, for example, but will fall as easy prey to a
nippy platoon of Lasers.

I discovered that on the first five or so levels my seemingly
invincible armies were getting mercilessly crushed under the
wheels of the computer opponent's tanks almost every time.
However, I soon picked up a few tactics and gained speed in
deploying my units, discovering that I was able to reach Level 15
easily and without significantly changing my tactics. I was
disappointed to discover that although there was great potential
for a great variety of levels all requiring different strategies,
the first three-quarters of the levels were very similar to one
another only with progressively more powerful robots and vehicles.
I was almost ready to give up the game out of boredom when I
reached level 15 where things suddenly started to get exciting.
Some fun levels appeared, for example one with masses of vehicles
parked in two areas, one near each fort, resulting in a huge head
on clash between waves of tanks and mobile missile launchers. The
last few levels were very tricky to complete, each taking about
ten failures before I could assess how I needed to proceed to win.

The five different planets - a desert world, volcanic, arctic,
jungle and metropolis, although graphically contrasting, were not
as different from one another strategically as they might have
been. A shame.

The game's control system could not be better. I found myself
embroiled in tactics straight away without reading the manual
because the controls (mouse with optional keyboard shortcuts) were
so easy to master. However, I did not feel that my options were
reduced by over-simplification. In some strategy war games that
run in real time you can get confused with too many things
happening at once causing you to lose track of your units. I found
this not to be the case in Z. There are lots of handy ways in
which the computer helps you monitor your soldiers' exploits. For
example, when a unit captures a territory, destroys an enemy unit
or demolishes a building, the robot's face appears in a window to
tell you in synthesised speech what has occurred. Every time a new
squad of robots or a new vehicle is manufactured, a calm female
voice notifies you and an icon appears to take you straight to the
factory. When units are being overwhelmed in combat a panicked
robot pops up and screams for help - clicking on him takes you
instantly to the scene.

Another criticism is that victory is much too dependent on the
possession of two or three more territories than your opponent,
and on the outcome of the first few tank battles. Because
manufacturing speed is proportional to the number of territories
you own, a small advantage turns into an easy victory when you
start churning out heavy tanks by the minute while your opponent
takes ten minutes to produce a company of Grunts. It is therefore
very difficult for an underdog to fight his way back into
contention.

The graphics are fairly detailed and very clear - you can always
see what is happening in combat. You can run them in VGA or SVGA,
with more fitting on the screen in the latter mode. Personally, I
found that I couldn't see enough of the battlefield to know what
was going on in the VGA mode although some of my friends would
argue that the SVGA mode makes the units too small for you to feel
involved in the action!

Between battles there are video sequences about two lazy supply
robots delivering weapons (usually late) to the unforgiving
Commander Zed. These are not particularly entertaining and you get
the impression that the same few snippets of video footage have
been put in a different order each time!

Although very slickly presented, and entertaining for a few hours,
I found that Z was simply not varied enough to be worth the money
I paid for it. There were not enough new situations to deal with
or enough different units to deploy. Twenty levels didn't take
sufficiently long to complete.  Where Z truly excels is in the
multi-player mode. Two computers can be linked with a null-modem
cable or modem to play a two- player game, or up to four with an
IPX or NETBIOS network. I have only tried the null-modem game so
far, but the hours of fun a friend and I spent in earnest combat
with each other certainly made up for any lack of variety in the
one-player mode. Z is one of those games that is perfectly suited
for multi-player - nothing compares to the sensation of completely
routing the meticulously constructed army of a smug friend and
then blowing up his fort with a single Grunt. A three or four
player game ought to be absolutely phenomenal!  I found that I
could not run Z successfully through Windows 95 even though the
manual said you could. Instead I had to run it by restarting my
computer in MS-DOS mode. It then ran without a glitch or bug in
the entire time I played it.

ROUND-UP

Not wholly worthy of the flattering reviews it got from many
mainstream PC magazines (who, we all know, only play the games for
a couple of hours), Z is not worth getting if you are concerned
with value for money, especially if you aren't a fervent fan of
strategy/war games anyway. If you have access to a friend, his or
her computer and a null-modem link then the game becomes a
must-buy. If you have a three or four computer network set up,
then I'm very jealous of you!














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