Armour-Geddon II (Second Review)

Title           Armour-Geddon II (Second Review)
Game Type       3D Combat Sim
Company         Psygnosis
Players         1-2
Compatibility   All (probably)
HD Installable  Yes
Submission      graeme.r.porter

Review
The original Armour-Geddon was a ground-breaking combat simulation.

You controlled a light tank, heavy tank, hovercraft, helicopter, fighter,
or bomber, and you had to collect 6 pieces of a neutron bomb so you could
destroy the enemy installation. Failure meant the enemy bouncing a deadly
energy beam off a satellite in orbit back down to earth where the
unshielded would be killed.

Featuring a massive simple-but-solid 3-D landscape, a range of different
land and air vehicles to pilot, and the fact that you could control 6
active vehicles at any one time, and connect two Amigas together to go
co-operative. And all in real-time.

The original was incredibly fast, smooth, and compatible, working on
machines from my stock A500+ to the A1200T w/68040 40MHz and 16 MB RAM
with no problems.

It featured a beautiful full-screen rendered intro animation, and did not
require a CD-ROM drive.

And then came Armour-Geddon 2 - Codename Hellfire.

Following on from the plot of the original game, Armour-Geddon 2 once
again sees the survivors of nuclear holocaust battling against the
surface-dwellers in a race to capture the Hellfire satellite that was very
nearly used to devastate mankind at the end of the first game.

Again, you are placed in command of a multitude of different vehicles,
which are :

- Truck
- Heavy Tank
- Light Tank
- Surface to Air Missile Launcher
- Hovercraft
- Stealth Fighter
- Stealth Bomber
- Airship

Once more, you have the opportunity of controlling up to six at one time.

This time, though, you now have to command your forces in a series of
missions to halt the production of the enemy's spacecraft, and increase the
rate of construction of your own.

You have to capture a launch pad, collect raw materials, deliver the
materials to the launch pad, capture factories, mines, scientists, and
enemy bases.

Along the way, you must also deal with the enemy air and land forces who
will be trying to destroy your three bases and shoot down your aircraft.

You will also control your Research and Development team, deciding what
they will develop, and how many of the team will work on each project.

Again, it features the massive 3-D landscape, but this time, you have more
detail - you have clouds, textured and transparent smoke, "textured" hills,
more detailed models, more hills, you can see a much greater distance, but
the good news is if your machine is too slow, you can set the detail
levels for each of these individually.

Also improved is the fact that you can install AG2 to hard disk - the
original game's disks were in a custom format (to make piracy more
difficult).

The intro to AG2 is also a rendered sequence; however, it is lower in
resolution, and doesn't look as smooth or as pretty.

Again, for people without CD ROM drives (not me !) the game comes on 3
floppy disks.

The sound is marginally improved, but isn't very realistic, I'm afraid.

Although I've not been able to test the head-to-head option, I'm told it
is more reliable than in the original game, as it strives to keep the two
machines synchronised for speed.

To sum up, I think Armour-Geddon 2 is a fantastic game. In terms of
speed, it's not as fast as the original, but it's almost as fun in every
other respect. Graphically it is also much prettier than the original
game.

Overall rating - 90%

Alphabetical list.