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Carrier Command 2 review: all lost at sequelTo the boats! To the boats!
To the boats! To the boats!
I am terrible atCarrier Command 2. Most of us will be, at first. There’s a little comfort in that. Its very concept depends on there being a lot to manage, and much of its challenge comes from having to deal with that. A fair bit of the satisfaction springs from mastering all its parts, both discretely and in combination. But after playing it for several days, I’m still nowhere near an expert. I doubt I ever will be.
And that’s okay. But I think this falls a little too short of its potential as a single player game to fully win me over.
Strategically, anyway. Practically speaking, what you will be doing is flicking switches, peering through binoculars, and switching off the monitors you’re not using because you’re energy conscious and then forgetting which one does what when you need them again, because you’re also an idiot. It is, like last week’sHighFleet, big on diagetic interfaces, although as with that game, sensible concessions are made when it comes to the action sections. Because, you see, you’re not just pushing icons around the map or watching helplessly from the bridge as another helicopter jinks directly into an oncoming missile. No, any time your drone vehicles are off the ship, you can connect to them remotely, either to passively supervise and spot from a circling recon ship, or to actively take over control, and crash into as many missiles as you damn well please.
This is not the action-first interpretation of Carrier Command’s other descendantHostile Waters, though. Most of your work will be co-ordinating and planning and tweaking orders, and when you do take the wheel, you’ll be greeted with a sim befitting the original. Ground vehicles are simple enough (and amphibious, the one case where Hostile Waters was actually a lot fiddlier) to handle, although you’ll still need to pay attention to the rangefinding readout once it’s tank time if you want those shots to count. Aircraft, however, are a game unto themselves, and probably the biggest roadblock to anyone wanting to dive in.
This is not a game you dive into. Between a reasonably-pitched tutorial and help menu and experience with similar games, I was quickly comfortable. Playing Carrier Command 2 is fairly easy. Playing it with any degree of competence, however, is another matter entirely.
It wasn’t long before I defaulted to spotting and sniping most defences from the carrier’s big guns, unwilling to trust air units with little sense of self-preservation or initiative, and unwilling to wait for buggies and tanks to crawl slowly to the beaches only to immediately run out of ammunition and have to come back.
Choppers are much less hassle to launch and land but god they’re fragile
That’s when a player who’s handy with a helicopter or jet would shine, of course, but I never quite got to grips with any of the aircraft. They handle uncomfortably via keyboard, with the mouse wholly reserved for the camera (and even then only if you have a camera module installed), and I felt the absence of analogue controls despite having used my controller precisely zero times in the last 18 months. Giving orders on the map, meanwhile, is naturally awkward on a controller, and while to its credit the game detects switching back and forth pretty well, there was always too much friction for me to ever feel confident flying any but the most cautious flights.
You issue orders on this map, and it’s simple enough to be easy to use, but also simple enough to be lacking important features.
I hope you’ve memorised your compass bearings, because they’re not displayed anywhere close to the torpedo station. Oh, speaking of which, the artillery tank isn’t in the S3 bay anymore, it docked at S5 during the last rearming and now you’ve launched the wrong one. You should have gone to the opposite side of the bridge to check! No, you can’t reassign them manually. And you should really check the radar again because there are no audio notifications for most things and we never did sink that last boat.
I could name a handful of petty complaints, but that would be missing the point. The real difficulty I’m having is that it’s far too much for one person to manage all this. Even if I was an ace pilot rather than the… I dunno, maybe six of hearts pilot I am, any time I was flying I’d be neglecting everything else. And perhaps I keep biting off more than I can chew, but any time I spend on tiny sorties to whittle safely away at an island is time that the enemy carrier will spend taking over two. I completely understand that spinning plates is the whole point of the design, but it’s just too much for me. And I once did very well at a job where I had 21 inboxes and ran a system to co-ordinate a dozen departments on top of my official job.
But I have been enjoying it. Apart from some bad layout decisions, the redundant monitors on the port side, and the chairs getting in the way, I love ambling about my bridge. The ocean gets ludicrously choppy, rain and nightfall are lovely, and the music is faintly reminiscent ofDeus Ex. Although it leans towards the sim rather than the action side, Carrier Command is far less fiddly than a dedicated flight game, and though small guns are a bit lacklustre, the cannon and missile strikes are lovely. I particularly like how the landscape will light up as the rocket trail of a cruise missile approaches, and I love that when you issue a launch order, you can then run down to the bays to watch the automated crane lift your bomber out and put it on the lift for takeoff. I do wish there were more dedicated turrets for manual control though. Hell, I’d settle for pulling an RPG out and taking aim from the deck when someone gets too close. But that’s on me for not holding a chopper back as an escort, I suppose.
It’s clear that even if my complaints are patched out or I simply rejig my brain enough to fully overlook them, Carrier Command 2 has a high skill ceiling. I don’t know if I’ll ever have enough time to devote to it, but I’ll certainly be playing it some more, which says a lot about any game that demands so much time as a bare minimum. And there’s one thing that’s obvious: Carrier Command 2 is going to shine in co-op.
It will need a group of friends like-minded enough to enjoy several minute stretches of someone steering the ship to the next island as much as sharing a tank seat, as much as splitting AI defences with a scout helicopter to keep the flak off the incoming jet bomber. It’s there, too, where the lovely but entirely unused interior of the ship will come into its own as five or six friends agree on a house rule that you must go to your bunk while afk, and can only be recalled to the bridge if someone up there activates the alarm. I can already see myself patrolling the corridors, grumbling obsessively about who left the lights on. I have already stolen the elevator pitch “Sea Of Theives crossed with Arma” fromSam Greer, and canvassed several friends for potential hijinks.
