Commanders represents a seldom-seen genre on the Xbox 360: turn-based strategy. If you've played Nintendo's Advance Wars then you'll feel right at home playing Commanders. An art deco style and a 50s pulp sci-fi story surround a solid strategy title with good pacing, an appropriate difficulty curve, and enough variety in mission and unit types to keep strategists busy for a very long time. And since Commanders is an XBLA game, the entire package - consisting of 15 campaign missions with two difficulties, 10 skirmish maps, and online multipayer - is a steal at the simple ten-dollar price.

Like any good strategy game, Commanders is essentially a big game of rock, paper, scissors. Light infantry beats heavy infantry, heavy infantry beats light tanks, and light tanks beat light infantry. Other units exhibit similar strength and weakness relationships. Heavy artillery, for example, is great at taking out all ground-based units, but it has no armor to speak of. Bombers and gunships can both peck away at tanks, but anti-air absolutely destroy them. Commanders adds a new wrinkle to these relationships, however. All commanders have both a passive and active ability. Alec Falcon, the first commander you'll play as, grants all surrounding units a defense bonus as a passive ability, and he can fire on all units in his range as an active ability. Other commanders have different abilities including passive healing, extended line of sight, increased artillery range, action points regeneration, and summoning reinforcements.

In a change from Advance Wars' "everybody move, everybody shoot" gameplay, units in Commanders each have a pool of action points to divide between movement and attack. For most units this amounts to either a small movement followed by an attack or a long movement. For some units, like the heavy artillery, attacks cost enough action points that the choice is either move or shoot, but never a combination of the two. Unfortunately, this is where Commanders' only potential flaw is exposed - the game doesn't hold your hand. Once you've made a move, it's done and can't be taken back so make sure you really want to move that heavy artillery as it can't move even one space and then shoot. For more experience gamers this shouldn't present a problem, but it can certainly be a source of frustration for those players that are new to turn-based strategy games.

What really ensures that Commanders will be played after the campaign is beaten is the offline skirmish and online multiplayer. With 10 available maps and both ranked and non-ranked play, Commanders 1v1, 2v2, and free-for-all multiplayer is great fun, and an interesting change of pace when compared to the single player experience. Commanders is a great deal for the price and a welcome addition to the XBLA library.

Feb 21, 2008 | 0 comments
Justin Last