Ground Control - great graphics and gameplay!
Ground Control always makes me start humming 'Major Tom' - the game itself is quite down to earth, though. The premise is quite interesting. You're a 34 year old senior female military person, working for the Crayven Corporation. The Order is your enemy, and you fight them.
That's about all you know as you begin the game. You fight them because you're told to by the cold manager, Enrica Hayes who has no brains and couldn't care why you do what you do. When you get your mission briefings from Enrica, you then get to configure your units with whatever options are available, fill your drop ships, and land to attack.
The game works with individuals grouped together into set units. While a set of 4 tanks move together, a particular tank can get wounded and die. You can't tell a particular tank to go somewhere on its own, though. The unit moves together. This makes it easier to manage many missions, simply grabbing units and pointing them in directions.
The graphics are great!! Ground Control has the move-anywhere view that Dark Regin 2. Very intuitive and easy to use. Follow along with a unit, or get a birds-eye view of the great graphical combats. While my Athlon-750 often choked on some of the larger scale combats (boding poor results for slower machines), in general it whisked along at a good clip.
The landscape is fully three dimensional and fully rendered. Hide in the shadow of a cliff to get an ambush jump on your enemy. Sneak along under trees or overhangings to avoid being seen. Troops have options for weaponry and healing that can be customized. Troops can be carried in APCs to zip from location to location, and peel out quickly into whichever formation you specify.
The downsides on the game are the stuttering I mentioned before on heavy-graphic situations, and also the general situation you, Major Sarah Parker, find yourself in. While it's great that the lead player and her boss are both women, it's very, very annoying playing a game in which you watch your 'friends' shoot up hospitals, where you're berated by your commander and where no matter how quickly you get to someone, the program insists it's "too late" and you must watch the person die to further the plot. I have enough frustration in real life without playing a game in which the lead character is drinking after each mission, wondering why she even keeps fighting. Does that provide any incentive for the player to want to keep playing?
Also, most games of this style allow the player to choose amongst factions and decide which side to play. In this game it's very one-linear. Each mission is forced on you, and what you do in the mission is pre-set. While replaying the same mission 10 times might have them decide to attack from the NE or the SE randomly, they always attack, and then the same exact messages always appear, which you cannot click through.
If you enjoy strategy combat without building units or structures, and have a fast enough machine to handle this, Ground Control might be the perfect game for you!
Ground Control Walkthrough
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