The greatest challenge a sequel has in the gaming industry is to live up to the vast expectations laid down by the title’s predecessor. If a series to date has sucked, then players won’t be expecting much out of the new game and will most likely end up easily impressed if it turns out decent, but when you sell a big-name title that effectively revolutionized and redefined a given genre to the point where players are still going “why don’t they make any new games like that anymore?”, then the challenge of constructing a good sequel skyrockets. It’s a tough balancing act – do you focus on all of the gameplay elements that worked in the original and try to expand on them, or take the plunge by pushing the series in a new direction with a total redesign? The smart and obvious thing to do is, of course, take what works and build up on that foundation, but sometimes you’ve just got to try something new. Or in this case, something conformist. Yes, conformist, in that Massive Entertainment’s newest title has turned out a lot more like other RTS games than I would prefer.

Enter Ground Control II. Taking place a couple hundred years after the original game, GCII focuses on a distant colony on the planet of Morningstar Prime. This colony, along with numerous others in the vicinity was left behind during the big corporate wars from the original game, and have prospered and expanded on their own. But a huge change has recently occurred back home on Earth, with a united Terran Empire emerging from the rubble of the last great war. The Empire wants to take back the outer colonies, so they send out an expedition, expecting weak opposition from the isolationists. Instead, they encounter a large space fleet that actually manages to repel the initial offensive. Morningstar Prime, once subject to a number of civil wars of its own has now united under one banner – the North Star Alliance – and is intent on remaining free. So naturally, the big mean Empire musters up another fleet, which finally manages to break through and invade the NSA’s home, with the only thing stopping a full-scale onslaught being an array of large shields around the most important cities on the planet, allowing the NSA forces to cower in safety – but unfortunately, the Empire has a few nasty tricks up it’s dastardly sleeves. It’s up to NSA Major Jacob Angelus to lead his men into battle in an attempt to force the Terran Empire away from Morningstar Prime once and for all.

Sounds like a recipe for instant fun, doesn’t it? Ground Control II has two separate campaigns (along with a third mini-campaign used for a brief tutorial), offering a large enough variety of missions to keep gamers entertained for at least several days depending on their playstyle – if I had to guess, I’d say GCII is overall at least as long as the original was. The first campaign opens up with a pre-rendered cutscene as a strange pod of unknown origin breaks through Morningstar Prime’s atmosphere, crashing into the city and taking out several buildings. Imperator Vlanna, the high-ranking officer overseeing the invasion of Morningstar Prime diverts her forces to try and recover the pod, while General Warhurst, a crazy smoking black man and commander of the local NSA Forces does the same. That’d be where the player comes in as Jacob Angelus to start kicking some Imperial ass. The initial levels of the campaign are pretty easy to grasp and don’t involve any real tactics beyond “take this objective, then take that one”, but as the campaign gets deeper and more and more units are unlocked (both in what the player has access to, as well as the enemy forces), strategic considerations start to get a lot deeper and the challenge ramps up considerably. As does the “head explosion” potential, but I’ll get into that in a bit.

No more are players given thorough briefings prior to a mission, but instead are given a brief text bite of background story while the mission is loading, and then given verbal orders on the fly while the game engine pans the active camera over specific objectives when necessary – in fact, engine cutscenes make up the bulk of the game’s storyline and briefing segments, augmented by the occasional FMV. Actually, pretty much all pre-mission preparation has gone out the window, with players basically learning everything they need to know only once they’re actually in the mission. This change over the original game isn’t anything to really complain about, but the modification in unit selection does. Units are no longer assigned, and then dropped into the field based on what the player decides to bring along. Instead, a pre-assigned array of troops are provided at the beginning, which the player has to use and keep alive until he can secure a landing zone on the map and start calling down reinforcements. Yes, that’s right, units are no longer a limited quantity in Ground Control II, except in certain missions. Once a landing zone is secure, the player’s personal dropship can be filled up with troops back at an off-screen headquarters and sent into the field. Dropships can only deliver at landing zones, but once they deploy their troops they can be set to either remain in the field to move around freely (for a limited time, so long as they have fuel) for scouting or support roles. Since the dropship can actually be upgraded with larger weapons, more armor, a bigger fuel capacity, or other things, it is actually possible to turn it into a flying fortress capable of leveling small armies single-handedly. This is a little disturbing with the crimps it throws into gameplay balance, and although the fuel limitations and possibility of being destroyed with enough enemy fire (a destroyed dropship takes several precious minutes to replace) offset the vast power that can be brought to bear with the dropship, I really consider this to be one of the numerous reasons why the way things were done in the original game to be much better.

As for the units themselves, there are certainly enough to allow for a certain level of tactical flexibility, and yet I found myself inevitably craving more. After being spoiled by the multitude of different unit types from the original game (such as the four totally different types of Aerodynes available, and all the different tanks and support platforms), I was a little surprised to see a shortage of unit types in GCII. Massive Entertainment has basically swapped out unit count in favor of a “two in one” system, where each unit can be switched to an alternate mode to unlock different functionality, but looking over the standard NSA unit listing, these differing modes are pretty basic – a tank shoots an anti-infantry machinegun instead of its main cannon, for example, or an artillery vehicle deploys to fire faster, at the cost of mobility. While there are at least three types of infantry now (Light Assault troops, with an alternate static mode allowing them to launch guided anti-armor missiles, Raptor Snipers perfect for picking off distance infantry, but they have to be deployed to fire, and Siege Soldiers, which are basically infantry in power-armor that devastate anything stupid enough to be in range), the rest of the unit types aren’t terribly diverse. Gone is the reliance on a “Command APC” to repair friendly units and haul troops around – instead, the functionality has been split into two vehicles. The Combat Engineer repairs specific units (ONLY specific targets too, annoyingly enough, because while it will sometimes try and fix things of its own accord, this rarely occurred for me and forced me to manually click on each unit I wanted healed) and can carry four soldiers, while the standard APC can carry eight soldiers and has a limited capacity for self-defense, as well as an optional smokescreen weapon. There’s also a better APC provided later on in the game that has a flamethrower for mowing down enemy troops, as well as a bit better armor, but that’s the only major difference.

Unfortunately, moving up through the NSA unit ladder reveals a significant drop-off in unique unit types. You’ve got your generic scout buggy with a surprisingly strong long-range cannon for hitting distant targets, a standard tank, a bigger tank that moves slower and does more damage, a generic attack aircraft, a transport aircraft, and that’s about it. I think the only real unit of major interest that the NSA is capable of fielding would be the Rocket Terradyne, which has somewhat weak weapons and flimsy armor, but a long range of fire and a shield that goes up when it enters a deployed state, offering instant protection against missile and artillery attacks, making it a very cool defensive weapon. Now with these units I’ve mentioned, it’s definitely enough to make for quite a choice of strategy as I said earlier, but it just isn’t enough. Again, the original Ground Control offered a large catalogue of different tanks, aircraft, and support vehicles to choose from where the player knew exactly what kind of unit he was selecting and what the full bonuses and ramifications of using this vehicle over something else was. Now, selecting troops to call in through the dropship interface feels too much like queuing up a bunch of random troops in a match of Command & Conquer: Generals. Because units (and their ranks, medals, and other stats) no longer carry over between missions, a special bond between me and my units has been lost, and I no longer felt bad for sending my best troops in on suicide missions for the greater good. Yes, individual still level up and increase in rank, but this only stays in effect for the current mission, and didn’t seem to make much difference beyond a slightly increased damage level (admittedly, I couldn’t see much difference from this in the original Ground Control either, but I was hoping for a change).

Before people start yelling at me for blatantly forgetting something, let’s discuss the other side of the Ground Control II unit hierarchy, the Virons, a race of space-faring warriors the player meets early on in the game with an advanced knack for nanotechnology . Unlike the NSA stockpile, the Virons have a rather unique array of units, with the most interesting part being how these units are obtained. While most basic units are still called in via dropship, players can order two similar units in the field to merge to form a singular new entity. For example, missile infantry can be merged to form mortar teams, or certain tanks can be combined to obtain more powerful vehicles. Melding is free, but impractical to do during combat because it leaves the units exposed and vulnerable while they combine into a “Meld Egg” and spit out the new unit several seconds later. The Virons have quite a bit of neat hardware to work with, including short-range infantry with deadly acidic flamethrowers, “Thumper” tanks that fire out deadly waves, dealing damage to anything they pass through, and two separate classes of artillery unit (a straight-up howitzer tank formed by combining two Engineers, and the aforementioned mortar infantry) with varying levels of effectiveness and range. But in the end, the Virons still come off as offering the same general mix of “man, tank, plane” vehicles as the NSA does, and they don’t really have any units that truly set them apart. Despite this, the second Viron campaign was still well worth checking out (and I predict a lot of players will enjoy trying them in multiplayer), but I just wish more had been done. Something else briefly worth mentioning is that the Imperial forces are also essentially their own faction, complete with their own set of infantry, tanks, dropships, and even giant walking mechs, but astonishingly enough, are totally unplayable, even in multiplayer. WTF?

Of course, it would be stupid to slam the game just because of unit limitations when there are more important things to think about, such as the all-encompassing question: ”is it fun?” The game’s singleplayer campaign has a very good storyline that felt just as engrossing as the original’s, and was also quite challenging, but there were times when I just wanted to bang my head against my keyboard in frustration. The difficulty of the campaign starts to escalate dramatically past the first few missions, issuing objectives that require the player to split his attention and forces sometimes in several places at once. The game feels a lot more larger-scale than the previous title was, with a huge focus shift on expending units to try and advance while maintaining a stream of reinforcements to keep your lines steady. There aren’t even any more deployables or special weapons, although static mini-turrets and radar emplacements can be called in via dropship, picked up by an APC or Engineer vehicle, and placed in the field for support (still “deployables” in a sense, but different from what the original offered through vehicle-specific configurations). But the basic gist of it is, the game is now much more demanding and larger-scale than the previous game was, and while fans of insane micromanagement will probably be in heaven with Ground Control II, I rapidly experienced the temptation to kill myself several times on certain missions that demanded I try to manage several squads of units across different fronts at the same time, or risk being overrun, and because the game now requires players to make up their own squads, unit control becomes a huge hassle. In the original, each and every group of units I entered the mission with was pre-assigned and set up in a friendly manner with an accompanying row of icons at the bottom of the interface, allowing me to ascertain exactly what the status was of all of my available troops. Now that the game is so much more large-scale, that kind of limited display isn’t an option, and trying to keep track of what all my men are doing during a large-scale conflict becomes a huge, royal pain in the ass that I immensely dislike dealing with. But on the “thank god” side of things, the developers were at least wise enough to respond to complaints from the original regarding lack of a mid-mission save feature, so you can now save any time you wish during a mission in GCII, cutting down on the frustration level by quite a bit.

Maybe I just suck, but the unit AI certainly didn’t help much in trying to co-ordinate a multi-pronged attack or defend a large base from several angles. Units tend to require a large amount of babysitting, as they will sit perfectly still when under fire and never move to intercept or get away from someone shooting at them from out of range. Effectively, anything involving unit mobility falls upon the player’s shoulders to explicitly handle, which is a huge contributing factor on why large-scale battles can be so damn headache-inducing. Even in a panic, it becomes a huge problem trying to move a large array of units into battle all at once, because only sixteen units can be selected at once (!). These problems can be partially offset by placing units into a building or forest (both of which offer their own defensive bonuses to units within) while your attention is away, but this is more of a compensation than an actual fix. Seriously, is it too much trouble to ask that my units won’t blindly stand around and get cut down by assault infantry just because the enemies have a slightly longer range than my men do?

The interface is problematic too. The minimalist interface I loved so much from the original is now toast, replaced with a bulky set of panels filled with tool-tips and information. This in itself isn’t a terrible thing, but some of the interface elements seriously need to be tweaked – one thing in particular being the mini-map, which I commonly had to squint at in order to make out the tiny details. There’s an option as of the newest patch to enable a mini-HUD, but while this got rid of a lot of the bulky interface elements, it also made everything smaller (yes, including the mini-map) and removed some basic information, such as the displays indicating how close a selected unit is from leveling up. In the end, I just stuck with the standard HUD and fiddled a bit with the font size settings to try and improve visibility, but I don’t understand why the development team tried to “fix” something that wasn’t broken in the first place.