Publisher: Eon Digital Entertainment
Game Site: Steel Soldiers Web Site
Availability: Now

Digital Entertainment and the Bitmap Brothers are trying to pump new life into the played-out RTS scene. Steel Soldiers is the sequel to the moderately popular Z, which was released back in 1996. Z added a slight twist to the harvest and build style of play. And as we shall see, Steel Soldiers doesn't stray far from its origins.

Steel Soldiers takes place after the conclusion of a peace agreement between the MegaCom Corporation and the TransGlobal empires. Everything is not what it seems, however, as two soldiers, Brad and Clarke, pick up an unidentified flying object in the demilitarized zone. They are told to investigate it and are subsequently captured. You, in turn, are sent in to find them and bring them back.

Steel Soldiers does add a little to the RTS scene. Instead of harvesting resources, you have to capture territories, which are squares or rectangles marked by a flag. This is a step in the right direction, as you have to focus more on the mission objectives than on harvesting resources. The more territories you control the faster you receive money and the faster it takes to build the units and buildings. However, I found myself spending most of my time building guns and AA sites to protect those territories. This was annoying, leaving me with the feeling that I was protecting harvest areas.

After you control enough territories, you can complete the mission objectives. Most of the objectives consist of destroying the enemy base, capturing an enemy base, or both. Some missions did have better objectives, as in an escape mission where you had to reach an airbase. But in terms of gameplay, Steel Soldiers offers nothing new. The territory idea is a nice change; but for the most part, you have to spend most of your time protecting the territory you control, as if it were a harvest field.

The units are dumb. They don't respond to orders, for example, and have an occasional tendency to run towards the enemy, getting themselves gunned down, for no reason. The units refuse to move when attacked, furthermore, and just stand there until they've been blown up. And in situations where you have a score of soldiers grouped together, an attack on one would not cause any one of the others to respond. All of this causes you to baby-sit your units.

Some GUI quirks are also found while trying to get construction robots to construct buildings. You have to click on them and then left click to bring up the construction menu. After you finally are able to bring up the building menu, getting them to build the desired building became a chore. And after you have picked a spot to build, and a little mark has been set up on the map, the construction robots sometimes just run over to the mark and stand there. This causes problems when you need to build something fast.

Moving to parts of the map using the mini map was also a pain, as was sending units across the map. Units often become deselected when you try to move them using the mini map. This makes the mini map practically useless, offering little beyond information about how much territory the computer holds. There is another mini map on the screen that shows you if certain units are under attack, and you can click it to be taken to that part of the map. This is where Steel Soldiers added something new to the RTS world and I hope other RTS games take advantage of this.

All in all gameplay is very basic, the game is not designed to be a difficult game and it's not. But with all the glitches and bugs, it becomes a difficult game to play and to like.