Recent reviews by Humanitys

Have you ever wanted to play as an amorphous tentacled bio-nightmare that consumes every living being in sight to grow to literally monstrous proportions? Me, too. Realize this dream for just $19.99 (or if you're a patient devourer, wait until the game goes on sale!).

Done well:
-Excellent sound and music design
-Tentacles
-Unusual player abilities
-Tentacles
-Fluid movement mechanics
-...Tentacles

Heads up:
-No map (use that hippocampus)
-Armed humans can be tricky to kill until you learn how to outsmart them
-Game price when not on sale (hence the patience, devourer)

Explore a cavern filled with mysterious, dormant technological ruins. Then as you solve puzzles, the ruins come to life in neon-Tron colors and EDM songs unique to the inputs you used to solve them.

It's a short game, but I don't think solving puzzles has ever made me bob my head like I did here.

As a bonus, you eventually unlock a digital sound mixing studio with synth tracks and patches that allow you surprising freedom to make your own EDM music. Also, major props to the devs for removing one of the broken achievements for the sake of 100%ers.

Although I never played The Red Odyssey back when it came out in ‘99 nor when it was added through patches in the online version of the base game, my review will likely be biased since I’m a hardcore fan of Battlezone. Either way, I hope my review is helpful.

The TRO campaigns feature two new factions to play as: the ISDF splinter group Black Dogs and the Chinese Red Army. The Black Dogs offer a grueling 15-mission campaign, which was the greatest single-player challenge I’ve faced in Battlezone so far. I went into it on the highest difficulty setting and was rewarded for my folly (the masochist in me wept quite bitterly throughout the duration of my play). The missions are frustratingly difficult in that for many of them, you need to fail over and over until you’ve memorized all the enemy spawns and how they will attack you. Think Dark Souls in space. But even when you know where the enemies are coming from, you still need to keep your limited number of units alive through the whole mission or prevent a very weak structure from being destroyed. Often times, getting a few seconds of bad luck sinks a whole mission.
The Chinese missions weren’t nearly as tough. I had more fun (and a much easier time) playing them. Instead of rolling you like dice against enemy attack waves, these missions had you employ irregular tactics to win, such as carrying out large portions of some missions on foot rather than in a vehicle, or sniping units from enemy convoys.

Both campaigns had decent plots. For the Black Dogs, it was “The overwhelming Chinese forces are crushing us, but through guerilla tactics and an obscene amount of luck (quite like how you feel in-mission) we will prevail.” For the Chinese, it was “Let’s pester the Russians and see if we can get any cool tech from them.” Easy enough to follow, but the storylines were horribly weak compared to the original campaigns. Where the original missions spun an interesting interplay between the Cold War and alien contact within the Greek mythos, the TRO missions offered meager two- to three-sentence paragraphs in the post-mission debrief that essentially boiled down to “Great job on defeating the enemy back there. We’ll really have the upper hand now!” Yup, an unsatisfying pat on the back is all I need for overcoming nightmarish AI forces. No story is fine.

So why did I give this a thumbs up? The Red Odyssey delivers a marvelous payload of new ships and buildings into its solitary and competitive play that enriches the game as a whole. Concerning multiplayer sessions, the Chinese faction is pretty unfair to go up against, since most of the units can turn invisible at the stroke of a key. However, the number of hardpoints on their ships are limited to help them stack a bit more evenly against the other factions.
Regardless, the fact that Battlezone pulls it off this well, especially for its uncommon first-person approach to RTS, is nothing short of astounding. This is was what I wanted TRO for, not for the story (or lack thereof), but for new ships, new missions, and the ability to pop more achievements in a game I’ve loved for over a decade.

TL;DR
Do you want to fly in more space tanks? Does vanishing from the visible dimensions as we perceive them tickle your fancy? Do you enjoy masochistic bouts against crushingly hard AI forces? Then The Red Odyssey is the expansion pack for you!! Buy it! Buy it now!!