Though it doesn’t hold onto the Z name, Steel Soldiers retains the same universe, characters and gameplay style of Z. The TransGlobal and WorldCom corporations have been battling each other for years. A peace agreement has finally been reached, and a cease-fire has been put in action in all territories. While Commander Zod and his squad await pick up from headquarters, a patrol stumbles upon something peculiar at one of the enemy encampments. Without thinking, the robot men open fire upon a base, a landing strip and blow up and incoming aircraft. Unless Zod can come up with reasoning for the firing quickly, he’ll have both TranslGlobal and WorldCom breathing down his neck. But there was something peculiar about that landing strip, and it’s up to Zod to send his men to go and find out what.

At heart, Steel Soldiers retains the same style of gameplay that has been around since the release of Dune 2: defend your fort long enough to gather the resources needed for a massive army to go stomping around the map. What spices the gameplay up is that Steel Soldiers fluctuates the flow of resources (robots aren’t built to mine the resources, the cash is simply added to your bank via magic) by the amount of territory you have a hold over. Territory is divided up through a series of flags that are marked all over the map, and while it’s possible to run operations with only a flag or two, eventually the enemy will overrun you with robots unless you push against their forces to take more land.

What happens is that there’s some strategy for overtaking the flags, but once decent defenses are established at each flag (or the computer gives up trying to take it), the gameplay goes right back to the mind numbing stuff we’re used to. This would be slightly passable if the artificial intelligence of your opponents forced you to be quick on your feet, but most of the time that doesn’t happen. Your basic Steel Soldiers mission is as follows: establish a base, struggle for 20 minutes trying to set up defenses, die because enemy forces overrun your base, remember that the computer follows the same strategies every time, and then conquer the mission. The AI never even tries the basic strategy of flooding your base with men. Instead, it decides to split its forces into groups of two or three and send them on suicide missions into your base. This won’t upset newcomers to the RTS genre, but veteran will become bored quickly with the lack of a real challenge.

That isn’t to say that the game is completely devoid of any fun because of the game’s dumb AI; that is not the case at all. Steel Soldiers is, in fact, an incredibly addicting and fun game because of its flag-based gameplay. Roaming around the landscape with a barrage of tanks, taking over a flag, waiting for more tanks to roll in and take the place of the weakened tanks and moving on for more killings is a great fun, it just isn’t a radical departure or a brain tease for gamers who have experienced this genre before.

The Bitmap Brothers have moved Z to a completely rotatable 3D world for Steel Soldiers, and though the game will not knock your socks off, it looks solid enough. The textures for the game settings, however, could use some variation. Since Steel Soldiers is split up into six types of land types (desert, snow, grassy, etc.), but the second level into a new theme feels eerily similar to the first because while it does look different, the textures are so similar that it all becomes repetitive to look at. With the move to 3D, there are a few unfortunate problems. Highlighting air-based vehicles can be a pain, as the camera many times can’t pull out far enough to group them without having to, one by one, move them to a clear area by themselves. The camera itself is tough to manipulate; both mouse buttons have to be held down in order for the camera to be rotated to the left and right.

I would love to tell you how Steel Soldiers performs in the multiplayer arena, but unfortunately, no one seems to be playing the game – at all! That’s right, not a single person was online every single time I tried. All the days I was plowing through Steel Soldier’s single player storyline I would pop onto GameSpy from time to time to see if anyone had entered the arena, and there was absolutely no one around. Hopefully things will pick up soon; with Steel Soldier being week in the AI department, going up against a human opponent would make the game much more challenging and interesting.

Z was an under appreciated real-time strategy game, and as much as I’d like to say that Steel Soldiers follows in that vein, it can’t quite live up to the original. The addictive qualities of Z are still there, but the passing years have made the underlying gameplay of Steel Soldiers boring, old and passé. Sure, it’s 3D, but the graphics aren’t advanced enough to make it worth playing for eye candy alone. With Battle Realms and Age of Mythology on the horizon, Steel Soldiers would only be worth it to Z fans or newcomers to the RTS genre.