Z - The Bitmap Brothers Reviewed by James Judge on a P120 Technical details first off... The minimum specs of the game (according to the box) is a 486DX2-66 with 8megs of RAM and a VGA card plus CD-ROM. However, I was able to get it running fine on a 486sx with 16megs of RAM. The game will run under DOS and through Windows 95 but in a DOS session (pish and tush) and is able to run, for multiplayer games, through null-modems, LANs (NetBios and IPX protocols are supported) and ordinary modems. Oh, and you'll need a mouse. Probably a monitor would be useful somewhere along the line. And I find a table to put everything on to be a boon too. Z isn't a very ostentatious title, but coming from the genius of the Bitmap Brothers who gave us excellent platform games on the Amiga and ST (Gods and Bitmap Kid, for starters) this didn't matter. After all, the game had been in production for ages, it looked good and the premise was sound - nothing could go wrong, could it...? Z is a game of war, much in the style of Dune 2 and Command & Conquer, where you take control of a small army, create more units and try to destroy the opposition while defending your units and fortress from the enemy attacks. Everything is seen in a bird's eye forced 3D view and everything is controlled by clicking and dragging with the mouse in real-time (ie there are no turns a la Civilization). The only difference with Z is that instead of little men running around you've got robots. Also the Bitmap Brothers wanted to create a game that was just as involving as C&C but without the player having to go into so much strategic detail. Also it was to be aimed at a more 'adult' audience with mild swearing in the cut scenes. Oh, and the game was meant to have good explosions. Whoopee!! Well, it succeeded in all of that apart from (a) being involving (b) being more adult and (c) having good explosions. So it didn't really fulfil its brief at all, did it? The game is a campaign with you visiting five different worlds each of which had four different scenarios to complete before progression onto the next world. Each campaign gave you a fortress and a few starting troops and from there you had to conquer the map and destroy the opposition. This is where the game starts to become radically different from games such as C&C and is, in my opinion, its major downfall. In C&C you can build extra buildings to tack onto your command centre and build up a respectable base from which to create your army and launch your attacks. However, in Z you can't create buildings. Instead the map is divided into quadrants, each of which contain at least a flag. Send a unit to the flag and you own that quadrant. In some quadrants there may also be buildings - capture the flag and control of the building also becomes yours. The buildings either build or repair your ground units and that's it on the building front. You don't have to worry about laying out your base in a logical way to make it harder for the opponents. You don't have to worry about a power supply. You don't even have to worry about money - the only limit to your production capacity is the time it takes to build a unit (each unit has its own time limit which is reduced when you own more quadrants). So, really, all you have to worry about is building the right units and protecting those flags. This instantly does away with one huge chunk of the C&C-style game appeal. Instead of worrying about supply of money (or ore) and power, as well as the layout of your base, all you do now is mill around some flags until you've built up a large enough army to destroy the opposition. This would be OK if the fighting aspect had any depth to it. With C&C the way you commanded your troops to attack was vital to the success of your mission. In Red Alert you were allowed to create platoons of units and arrange them in a tactical order so the lightly armoured units would be at the back of the attack with the tougher units at the front, and the units would stay in those positions until they died. However, in Z the method of winning a battle is just to simply make sure you have more troops than the opponent. There are no tactics that you have to worry about, other than the fact that all of your desired units are in the correct area at the right time, and once you've started the attack you just sit back and watch as the bullets go flying. You can be assured of a victory as long as your units equal his in strength and have greater numbers. No degree of cunning will aid you to a discernibly positive result, which is a shame. What doesn't help the shallowness of the game is the limited number of units you can build. There are three basic varieties - ground troops, vehicles and artillery. There are six kinds of ground troop - each being different from the other - and seven vehicles to create, three of which are different strength tanks, one an Armoured Personnel Carrier and another being a crane (for repairing bridges and structures). Those two groups are the total of your offensive units and more often than not, you won't want or need to employ more than four or five different unit types throughout a whole mission. To complete a mission you must either enter the opponent's fortress, capturing their flag, or destroy all of their units. Both of which are easily done on all but one of the twenty missions. And that, unfortunately, is the limit of this game. The graphics are nicely drawn - either in VGA or SVGA and the sounds are passable. The incidental graphics during the game are amusing and well-done (such as the way your ground troops embark on a slaughter of the hapless penguins on the ice world, with the penguins being blow up, out of the screen towards to you) and the cut scenes show competence, but are lacking in humour (such as in Worms) and variety - at the end of each mission you get the same cut scene but with different speech, and the attempt to add mild swearing into the dialogue backfires, becoming obvious and childish. When I was running it through the 486sx I also came across some glitches in audio-video synchronization with the same soundbite being played twice quickly in succession - once in time with the graphics and secondly for no apparent reason. This may have something to do with an underpowered graphics card and overall system, but then again, maybe not. Strangely enough, though, it ran better through Windows 95 on the 486 than it did on my friends' Pentiums, but my P120 can handle it fine. Spooky. On the multi-player front things change little. Each player must have a copy of the CD in their drive and up to four people can play on a level either through a LAN or the Internet. The only thing that changes significantly is the intelligence of the opposition and it is just a matter of who has the quickest reactions and better troops - very little strategy enters into the game, making it dull and boring. If you are looking for a game that looks OK (nowhere near as nice or polished as Red Alert) and is very easy to get into then this game may be for you, especially if you want a gentle introduction into the genre of computer warfaring. However, the game may give you the wrong impression of the genre as it removes nearly all of the fun parts of other games of its nature - namely loads of troops, the ability to build up your own base and being able to use tactics other than 'mine is bigger than yours'. For the time that went into the game and the hype that surrounded it, Z was a great disappointment. Compared to other games, such as the Westwood trio of Dune 2, C&C and Red Alert (not to mention Blizzard's Warcraft 2) Z doesn't have the depth or challenge of any of its counterparts in either single- or multi-player modes. Shame really but let's be thankful that they didn't release previous versions - A, B, C.... X and Y . - o -