Total Annihilation - Kingdoms - 09/10/99
by: John Rowe

I miss the Tanks:

While this game does look nice, very nice infact, and everything is brilliantly animated I still miss the good old tanks of old (the original game that is). I guess it’s the feeling, it feels more satisfying to have a ARM Bulldog take out a load of Core buggies, you don’t get the same buzz from seeing 12 archers pick off a few knights. 

Anyway, the terrains are lovely and make a welcome change from TA’s boring desolate landscapes, and the textures there used are superb. The units are lovely however there must be a lot of simple minded people in the world as I’ve heard quite a few people complaining that they can’t tell the units apart, which I can’t quite comprehend. When I’m being attacked, I know exactly what is attacking me; anyone who thinks a Fire Demon looks the same as a Knight must have serious eyesight problems. Everything is as mentioned earlier, beautifully created and animated, the Dragons for example are nothing short of amazing. 

This brilliance comes at a price however, the specs for this game are ridiculous, we here have been trying to figure out what types of computers the boys and girls at Cavedog must have, maybe they are all a year ahead of us when it comes to hardware. Anyone who thinks they can get away with the minimum spec is sadly mistaken, but there is always someone that will say it runs fine on his P200 with 32 meg ram, he obviously thinks that a game is supposed to update once a second. Those of you with P3’s will also have a hard time keeping it smooth in a skirmish with more then 2 computers on, this is the sole reason that a lot of the people I know here don’t play this, they can’t stand the lag.

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