Forum Overview :: Reviews :: A.I.M. 2: Clan Wars first impressions review

[quote name="Mischief Shai-hulud"]<A HREF="http://skyriver.ru/project.phtml?p=mech2&l=en" TARGET="new">A.I.M. 2: Clan Wars</A> This more than makes up for the disappointment of Conquest of Elysium. Found this by accident deep in the Gamersgate archives. Never heard of it? Me neither. Remember the hovertanks from the 1998 Battlezone "remake?" This is a "living world" Elite clone populated by hundreds of them. It's one of the most fun games I've played in a long time. The first negative for this game is the crazy Russians who designed it made NO concessions for people who haven't played the first game. After an optional flight tutorial you are thrown straight into the deep end picking up where you left off last game. So I played AIM 1 and here's the plot: In the future, humanity makes a bad choice of friends and gets embroiled in a massive galactic war. Humanity and its organic tech ally develop fully automated weapons development laboratories on uninhabitable planets. Large chunks of the planet are sealed off with mountains and force-fields and terraformed into earth-like environments connected by an underground highway of tunnels. A massive computer called "Super" runs the facility, and military craft are built then piloted in live-fire combat exercises by AIs called "mechminds." The mechminds are encased in spherical cases that are practically indestructible so they can be recovered from the wreck of their hovertank, installed into a new one, and continue their obsessive pursuit of "perfection." Outside the range, the destruction wrought by the war gets so out of hand a race of ersatz <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJjrnDfZSnI" TARGET="new">Organians</A> wipes out humanity's military and leaves them planetbound. Meanwhile, on Range-4, Super hasn't heard from its Creators in centuries and starts experimenting with forbidden technologies, creating new and slightly nutty mechminds. AIM 1 starts with you playing the newly-activated prototype for a fifth generation of mechminds, the first with full sentience and no compulsion to follow the mission of the Creators. As you explore the Range, you find that mechminds with similar ideas of what perfection entails have banded together into clans, the climate control systems are starting to break down and here and there dangerously radioactive alien life from the outside planet has taken root, and one of the most powerful clans of mechminds is on the verge of revolt against Super. When you finally make contact with Super, you're tasked with taking the emergency shuttle back to Earth to give the Creators a full report on the breakdown at Range-4, as well as a teleport gate to come through. However, you also come across a giant Anenome-looking observer from the ersatz Organians who says that the mechminds are on the verge of becoming a new form of intelligent life and advises you to destroy the shuttle so that the Creators can't retake control of Range-4 and Super will be forced to abandon its weapons-development mission and free to develop mechminds as a species further. AIM 2 assumes you took ending 2, which left your hovertank destroyed along with the shuttle and your mechmind lying in a ditch outside the range awaiting rescue. It's nice to play a sci-fi video game that isn't about goddamn space marines again. So you pilot a heavily armed hovercraft across a variety of environments trading goods, running missions, blowing shit up, and ultimately conquering the entire range one mechmind at a time. Like Space Rangers 2, every NPC in this game is a unique individual going about their own business as you zip around. The big new feature of AIM 2 is that if you blow up their hovercraft and scoop up their mechmind, you can spend money to brainwash them into joining your personal clan. Piloting the hovertanks in AIM 2 is a joy. They handle like more nimble versions of the snowspeeders in Empire Strikes Back with the ability to make mid-air hops for altitude of sideways course adjustments. Fed-ex missions don't feel like a chore because it's just fun gliding over valleys and jumping over canyons, before slamming the afterburners and juking like a madman when you get jumped by a pack of hostiles. Unlike Battlezone, the gliders don't move sideways very fast, so combat is not a big circle-strafe-o-rama, more of a "speed is life" joust. In fact, piloting the gliders is so fun outside the context of the elite campaign that AIM 3 is a <A HREF="http://skyriver.ru/project.phtml?p=racing&l=en" TARGET="new">racing game</A> (which I haven't played) Don't expect much graphical flash beyond the massive size of the environments. AIM 1 I wouldn't recommend, its economy is messed up and the graphics have not aged well at all. AIM 2 addresses all my complaints with a generous economy and graphics that are bright and colorful, albeit at a detail level best observed zipping by in a blur. Recommended.[/quote]