Game Reviews

Military Madness

Star onStar onStar onStar onStar off
Get
Military Madness

As Edwin Starr established all those years ago, war is good for absolutely nothing. Unless of course you’re a video game designer, in which case it’s great for providing the backdrop to millions of different titles over the past few years.

Military Madness - first released on the NEC TurboGrafx-16 console back in 1990 - is just one of the many games that has taken the concept of humans blowing up other humans and turned it into an incredibly addictive way for us warmongering gamers to pass the time of day.

The game has rightly gained a cult following over the year, so it’s relatively easy to understand why Hudson Entertainment has selected it as one of its first Android-exclusive releases.

If you’ve ever settled down with a copy of Nintendo’s fantastic Advance Wars - or, more recently, Javaground’s iPhone epic UniWar - then you’ll already have a pretty good idea of what to expect here.

Two opposing armies face off on the surface of the moon with the shared objective of blowing each other to smithereens. Each force comprises several different unit types, ranging from humble foot soldiers to gigantic aerial fighter jets, and each must take turns in marshal their troops to glory across the hexagon lunar surface.

Naturally, common sense would dictate that putting a lowly infantry unit up against a heavily-armoured tank bristling with deadly weapons would be tantamount to suicide, but your standard soldiers play a vital role - they’re the only units able to occupy the various factories that you find dotted around the map.

Once appropriated, these facilities enable you to produce new units to replenish your force and also repair troops that have taken a beating in the line of fire.

Combat in Military Madness is deep and rewarding. Although the type of unit is the most important factor in terms of deciding the result of each engagement (for example, putting your ground-to-air artillery unit up against your enemy’s tank is only going to result in you looking rather silly) there are other factors to consider which can radically alter the outcome.

Terrain is the most obvious, with certain areas of the map providing better cover than others and therefore giving your defence statistic a welcome boost.

The other variable is supporting fire from friendly units. Should you engage an enemy with another of your troops standing alongside them you’ll notice that your attacking ability increases. The more units you have adjacent to the enemy, the more punching power you possess.

Hudson Entertainment has done a fine job of giving this classic game a much-needed modernisation. The visuals are vastly improved, with highly-detailed sprites and impressively textured surroundings. Sonically things are a little less impressive: although the music is suitably atmospheric it loops far too quickly and soon becomes annoying. Thankfully you can switch it off altogether.

We would have liked to see a more comprehensive tutorial mode - although the ‘help’ menu tells you the basics, much of the more detailed aspects of the game are left for you to discover on your own. Still, the core gameplay is fairly intuitive and if you’ve played any other examples of the genre from the previous ten years then this should be fairly self-explanatory.

The Android Marketplace isn’t exactly flooded with quality strategy games at present so this is very welcome release. Hopefully Hudson Entertainment will expand its support for the service over the coming months, because we’d love to see Android-exclusive updates of some of the company’s other classic franchises.

Military Madness

Pocket generals take note: this is top-quality turn-based war gaming
Score
Damien  McFerran
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.