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A much maligned game...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: March 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Having played the original Battlezone, I can understand why players of the first game are so critical. The original was the very first of its kind, it successfully combined first-person shooters with real-time strategy.

The first problem I encountered was a poorly written manual - only one-third discusses how the vehicles and buildings actually work. Once you can figure out how to play the game, BZ2 is a blast.

What makes BZ2 better than BZ1?

- You can enter buildings like the Recycler and Factory, and alter weapons loadouts. This is useful if you want all your tanks to have SP-Stabbers, or your turrets to have Lasers, for instance.

- It's much easier to build Gun towers now. Instead of being near a power station, they must be adjacent to a relay bunker. You can also use the relay bunker's console to access a top-down view of the battlefield. This means you can 'hop' gradually towards an enemy base, building relay bunkers and gun towers as you go.

- The graphics are better than the original. Unfortunately they do require a very powerful computer. I have a Pentium II 266MHz, with 128Mb RAM, a 16MB Viper V770 videocard and a Monster Sound MX300 soundcard - and I have to play the game with all the graphics options turned off.

The disadvantages?

- Pandemic has re-written the original story. In the first game, it was the Russians that created the Furies, not the US.

- EXTREMELY poor AI. It's possible for your units to be destroyed by friendly fire. Perhaps Pandemic should've cut and pasted the AI routines from the first game. Advice for new players - NEVER put any of your vehicles in front of a gun tower!

- The bland music soundtrack. The original game's music was quiet and tense. It added an atmosphere of excitement to the game. The new game's music ocassionally excites, but most of the time doesn't.

In summary, I wish Pandemic had spent more time tightening the code. The AI routines are poor, and I feel more effort should've been put into making sure Battlezone 2 runs on low-end computers (like mine). Other than that, it's a very good game. But I don't believe it exceeds or meets the standards of the original game. Perhaps the third time will be the charm?

WOW!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: April 13, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Imagine a stragety game where not only are you commanding this battle in all aspects from a safe location, but imagie if u could take control of one of those units your controling to lead the battle yourself to your every desire? Now try and put this game on the internet with some amazing graphics and add in some killer weapons and vehicles. okay? Now that would be cool, but what if you also had the option to eject from the vehicle and enter buildings, sniper other ships pilots and take control of enemy ships? you try and tell me this game isn't the most addiciting best stragety war game ever and i'll probably die! trust me! its more than worth every dollar you spend!

It's actually a very cool game.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: January 22, 2000
Author: Amazon User

In the newsgroups and on some game magazine I read reviews that criticize the game. The bottom line of these people is that the game, compared to the predecessor 'Battlezone' is cheesy. Well, I don't know about Battlezone I becuase I never played it. This game though, is still very good. It's based on a very cool idea: you are a soldier and you can drive anything, from powerful war machines to buidlings (turrets and factories and such). You don't actually drive a factory: you just get in and configure it the way you want. You also can get in a turret (and it's damn fun to blow a bug up with one of those big plasma turrets! ). If you built it (and you have to) you can get into the 'Relay station' which is a building that uplinks to a satellite and gives you a satellite view of the action and lets you play the game in a traditional (almost) RTS fashion. The game is sci-fi and definetly arcade-ish. Do not expect a sim or the ultimate RTS game from it. It's still a very cool idea to allow you to switch from an RTS view to a first person view: you send your troops to fight and then you get in your tank and go with them to fight and suffer the consequences of your strategical mistakes or enjoy blow enemies up in person! I reccomend it to any action or RTS player: it's a game to try out!

WAY better than BZ1

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: December 07, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Anyone who states that this game has been ruined is doing crack. I'm even buying a second copy for my friend so I can play against a human instead of AI.

Reasons it's better than BZ1:

- Better AI. The units seem smarter and they get out of your way most of the time. There is less bumping around.

- You don't get killed if you walk into a tank.

- The unit grouping is SO much easier than before. In fact, I've never seen it successfully work in BZ1.

- Sniping is harder to do and you can't snipe everything. Pretty much just the hovercraft. Not tanks or slow-moving stuff.

- Resources are more plentiful so you can worry more about fighting and defending.

- You can cue up guys so you don't have to go back to your factories every time you want to make another guy.

- You can have WAY more units than before. I think it used to be 10 mobile guys and 10 turrets. This time you can have a total of 100 guys!!

- Graphics are way better, although you need a powerful PC and video card to utilize it.

- Repair trucks so you can repair guys and re-ammo guys out in the field. They also are pretty smart about automatically fixing guys. No need for the armory method.

- You can configure your factories to make vehicles with more powerful weaponry built-in so you don't have the hassle of the manually doing it with armory... which sukked.

- The map mode is way useful. See your guys from above and tell them where to go and what to attack. You also get it early in the game.

- 1 type of service pod instead of 2. It replenishes health AND ammo at the same time.

- Play a melee against the computer!!! BZ1 couldn't even DO that!

- 2 very destinctively different races. The ones in BZ1 were pretty close to being the same.

I'm sure there is more, but I'm running out of space. Get this game and play it with your friends. It's very different from a normal RTS, but that's what I like about it.

The Greatest game ever made

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: February 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ok so the title of greatest game ever may sound like an exaggeration , but for me it's not at all , I've been playing this game now for 5 years or so and I'm still not bored of it .

I can understand some of the reviews here that state the game runs badly , it did to a certain extent when it was first released , unfortunately Activision were somewhat impatient in releasing this game and shoved it out of the door before it was really ready for release . Luckily for those of us that are still loyal to this game (and there are still quite a lot of us especially given the age of the game) it is continuing to be supported in an unofficial capacity by a couple of the game's original devlopement team by the way of new patches , etc .

Technically speaking this game is a vast improvement over it's predecessor , the game is far more moddable which has without doubt added to it's longevity , multiplayer is a lot more stable and it's no longer possible to cheat in the way that totally destroyed Battlezone 1 as a multiplayer experience . Graphically this game is still superb , even now , giving some of the more recent titles a good run for their money . Only when compared with the latest crop of titles such as HL2 does this game start to show it's age a little ( and even then it's only a little).

As a gaming experience nothing still compares to this , infact nothing else even comes close to this ( except maybe the first Battlezone Game) . Battlezone 2 is a seamless blend of first person action and realtime strategy , allowing you to control your forces and build a base, etc. from right there on the battlefield in glorious first person perspective whilst simultaneously blowing the hell out of hoardes of alien attackers with the combat unit of your choice . You have a vast array of different vehicles at your disposal including fast and manoueverable hover tanks , to slow powerful tracked vehicles , flying bombers and APC's , resource collection vehicles and construction rigs . Add to this 2 very distinctive races with their own technologies and weapons and vastly different strategies , and you have something really special that will take many a month to fully explore . The depth of this game is simply breathtaking whilst at the same time being easy to get into , a true marvel of innovative game design .

Probably the weakest element of this game is the single player campaign , the storyline veers away from the original game slightly making continuity a bit dubious . The singleplayer campaign itself I found a bit easy to beat , but it still offers a lot of variety with a wide range of mission styles .

The multiplayer is what seems to keep a lot of players coming back to this game time and time again , the team strategy is fast,furious and intensely addictive , there really is nothing quite like this out there anywhere at all .

Since the game was first released there have been several significant updates which help to improve the overall quality of the Battlezone 2 experience . The first of these was the 1.1 patch which contained many critical fixes and support for win2k . After this came the unofficial 1.2 patch which included support for a multiplayer Co-op mode known as MPI , a range of balance tweaks and fixes for many errors . Finally we have the unofficial 1.3 patch which is still in production ( there is a public beta available ) which fixes many exploits and bugs found over the years and adds a whole raft of new options and even greater mod support .

On top of all of this you also have community authored mods and expansions such as Forgotten Enemies which adds a whole new singleplayer campaign featuring over 20 new missions , 2 new races : The Hadean Crown ( also available to use in multiplayer)and the AI only Cerberi , Forgotten Enemies also offers new multiplayer and instant action modes . Also worthy of mention is the superb G66 mod , the definitive multiplayer Co-op addon that includes rock hard AI opponents and intense action all the way . It doesn't end there either , exciting new mods and expansions are still in production even now .

When you add all this together you have a game that despite all the odds and initial bad press has survived for over 5 years and still shows no sign of diminishing support , the number of online games has remained almost constant (albeit somewhat low) ever since the game was first released . It is a game that is unique , highly demanding , extreme fun and graphically beautiful , a true classic in every sense of the word . Whilst the other games I bought around that time and many I have bought since all now gather dust Battlezone 2 still gets played on a daily basis .

..... so the greatest game of all time ?

you betcha !! I have no doubts about this whatsoever and I anticipate it remaining so for a long,long time to come .

An amazing game held back

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: April 11, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game has/had the potential to be something amazing, but it falls short because of "issues". For anyone who has ever played a multiplayer Strategy game of this successfully will be instantly hooked because it is so unique and entertaining. Activision(the publisher) forced this game out the door and Pandemic(the developer) didn't have the chance to finish and polish the game like it so badly needed. It is a diamond in the rough right now, hopefully Pandemic can patch it up so the game can be like it was originally intended.

BZ 2 is the best of the best

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the best games I have ever played! The graphics and gameplay are stunning, it makes you really feel like you are out there. The only bad thing about this game is that it has high system requrements. Other than that, it really tests your strategy skills and your accuracy. It would be a mistake not to get this game, just make sure your system can handle it.

BZ2 awesome, console gamers are nublets who cant play :P

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

~ Firstoff, BZ2, if you take the time to play it you'll be emersed in alot of great stuff! It took me bloody 2 years to get it to work and I finally got an ATI 7000 so it would. Thats how hard I wanted to play it!

~ The BZ genre is based on mythology, and greek mythology, cant go wrong there :)

~ This Game is one of the hardest to find sometimes and I suggest getting it, its a good socializing place as well and the people in this community are very nice.

~ Uh if anyone did see my giving away for free post, it was a joke, nothing serious heh...

Timeless Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have had this game since it was first released and still love it. It is the only game that I keep going back to. The gameplay is even more enhanced due to the community input with many maps and mods. For a budget game it's a bargain. best regards Condor

Battlezone II - FPS and RTS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Battlezone II may be an older game, but it's still one of the better games that I've played. A mixture of FPS (first person shooter, not frames per second) and RTS (real time strategy), this game can be addicting in both ways.
The story of the single player mode is very good, and the game allows you to make decisions that add re playability to the game.
While the multi player mode only supports up to four players, it's still highly enjoyable. The tactical options are endless, and the thrill of seeing and defeating your human opponent's personally crafted defenses is highly rewarding.
The game is slightly older, so the graphics aren't pushing the current technology, but the game is so good that it more than makes up for anything that technology couldn't do at the time it came out.

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