Massive has opted to have players begin the campaign without a choice between sides. This was probably in an effort to keep their storytelling devices from head-butting each other. While a few games have managed to pull off the two-sided storylines, even popular games like StarCraft and Myth have used different forms of what Massive has done here. The story itself isn’t that complicated. You take the role of Major Sarah Parker, who commands a squad in the Crayven Security Force. The CSF is your basic corporation turned military power. Their concerns lie more in the numbers than the people. While Major Parker works for them, she doesn’t hold quite the same ideals. As the plot unfolds the CSF sends Parker on various missions against the ‘Order of the New Dawn’. Through the course of the story they pretty much leave her out of the loop, which is when she starts poking around where she doesn’t belong.

Voice acting has been a problem with many PC games in the past, but Ground Control’s voice acting is quite above average. Everyone seems to be from eastern or Western Europe, which makes me wonder what happened to the Americans! Anyway, I suspect since a European developer developed this game, that itself is the cause. It isn’t a big deal, just in case any of you are wondering.

Ground Control is a title that has a primary focus around the combat element of war. By essentially chopping the popular essence of RTS gaming in half, it was up to Massive to fill the void left by the lack of resource gathering, base building, and researching. What fills the void is a series of environment, troop, and configuration variables that have a great deal of influence on the outcome of any battle in the game. Battles aren’t simply about health/armor points; now it’s about true ‘line of sight’, using light and shadow to mask troop movement, taking the ‘high ground’, and flanking the enemy at its weakest spot. This may sound daunting, but the task of pulling these sorts of enemy duping tricks and maneuvers off painfully simple thanks to well organized and prioritized in-game menu.

The game forces the player to think differently in some respects. The player’s forces are inserted on the battlefield via a small number of large drop ships. Before a game starts the units that the drop ships will carry can be configured with different armor/speed/offense/defense ratios, as well as different types of finite specials which all operate in unique ways. Types of units can be swapped with other available units, but the drop ships only have so much room. Once dropped on the battlefield the preservation of units is absolutely imperative to any mission. Each type of unit has a variety of uses within its own special area. While the scout unit will usually be used to ‘scout’, it can be outfitted with heavier weapons, and they can also shoot down air units, which can allow the unit to serve as an effective short-range light escort for a convoy. Other larger units serve as the spearhead of any battle group. Artillery units serve a very special, and important role. Artillery has a way of making short work of a battle group from a distance away from the real fighting. These units can carry tactical nuclear weapons. Yet they can be extremely vulnerable to a flanking attack if too many of your supporting units are on the front line. They fire slowly and in a large arc.

Something I almost forgot to mention is that along with the basic unit attributes, units also have weaker areas in their armor, much like units in Relic’s Homeworld. Infantry will have a great deal of trouble taking out a heavy tank from the front where the armor is thickest, but if an assault comes from behind with the use of their special (and limited) anti-tank rockets, the results can be quite different. Yet these aspects do not solely decide the many outcomes of a battle. As mentioned earlier the natural battleground is rife with all sorts of terrain elevations which all cast their own sort of shadow. Not only does the extremely varied terrain emphasize the idea of high ground, low ground, and line of sight, but also the effective use of light which actually does matter when an enemy is engaged. Line of Sight has, in my opinion, been an iffy concept full of wishful thinking in some titles, but Ground Control manages to pull this off quite well. In one missions the player can move their troops to the top of a cliff without the enemy troops right below them even knowing it.

All of this sounds good, but how does it control? Well troop maneuvers like flanking, PC gamers have been doing for a while now, it is just they haven’t mattered nearly as much as they do in Ground Control. Line formations, troop aggressiveness, and current special weapon status are all displayed on the unobtrusive menu that runs along the right side of the screen. The formations include only the most basic and most effective formations. Going all out on formations is nice, and I often appreciate the selection, but I think the ones included in this game have enough specific results to keep the casual tactician happy.

The biggest thing to be wary about in any 3D oriented title is the camera. It can be what often makes or breaks a game, Force Commander being the most recent example of this. The camera configuration is nothing like Homeworld’s aside from the fact that it is almost completely mouse driven. The mouse controls the turning of the camera which allows precision focus, while the four arrows on your keyboard allow you to pan forward, backward, left and right. Either the pageup/pagedown keys or the mouse-wheel controls the height of the camera. This ends up being a surprisingly functional, but different, control scheme. The use of the mouse-wheel is much easier than the additional keys, so I suggest getting a mouse with a wheel and join the rest of modern society!

I wanted to save the visual comments as one of the last things to touch upon because it is obvious from screen shots that the visual presentation of this game is remarkable. I wouldn’t feel bad to say this is the most visually impressive RTS title I have come across. On slower machines, the fog line does need to be moved in a bit if you wish to keep a certain resolution or detail to the units, but overall a very solid performance. My only real complaint is that the intro and in-game video sequences do not have a default low resolution, which makes it extremely taxing on even higher end systems that have the game set on resolutions above 800x600. Running the videos at 1024x768 tends to create a stutter what sort of ruins some of the experience.

To top off the excellent single player missions (with a difficulty modes to boot!), Massive has added a neat twist to real-time strategy deathmatches. Although the ability to create a static game with a set group of people is still available as a ‘standard deathmatch’, it’s the ‘drop-in’ deathmatch games that present the most fun. Much like a first-person shooter deathmatch players will drop in and out of a multiplayer game as they please. This not only creates an extremely dynamic multiplayer experience, but it also enforces the idea that while the game requires real strategies in order to win, it can be just as fast and furious as the classic RTS model. Only minor gripe I have with the drop-in games is that drop points are static which many players have already learned to camp around. Otherwise performance on WON.net is actually quite fantastic without any noticeable lag.

Having Ground Control as their debut title says a lot for the Swedish development team. Not only have they captured the spirit of the combat oriented real-time strategy title, but they have also managed to pull it off with only a few minor flaws. Hopefully RTS fans will not be daunted by the unconventional RTS model this game incorporates into its gameplay, because Ground Control is currently the best real-time strategy title I have played since Homeworld.