Probably the most long awaited game of recent months is finally here, and we've been able to get a copy of it to review. Napalm. It's pretty amazing what they can do with computers nowadays, as Napalm kind of proves. One PC-person who saw a demo of the game said the graphics were rubbish. I kindly pointed out that the 2x2 pixel blocky- ness of Napalms closest rival (C&C) looked far worse. And it does.
Napalms plot is really no different to the game that started it all, Dune II. That game had you building bases, killing enemies and mining a substance to gain credits to do all the other things you needed to do. Command and Conquer has you doing exactly the same thing, and so does Napalm.
Command And Conquer (in some people's opinions) improved upon the original Dune II, and I think Napalm has improved upon C&C rather a lot. For a start, it works on the Amiga. The graphics are way, way better than C&C and it doesn't need anywhere near the spec that C&C needs to run.
OK, so its a pretty demanding game. I spent the best part of a day figuring out that I needed to kill all running Commodities in Work- bench and reduce WBs depth from 256 colours to just 2 before Napalm would work.
Anyway, Napalm consists of two teams. The Humans and the Robots. The humans, when you look through the little booklet that accompanies the Napalm CD, seem to be inferior. This is why I started playing as the Robots to start with.
It would probably be a good idea to start as the humans to familiarise yourself with the game and it's engine. It took me about 3 attempts to get past the first level, partly because I'm crap at strategy games until I get REALLY used to them, and partly because the game is damn hard.
The enemy intelligence is possibly the best seen in an Amiga game ever. They are very intelligent things, and like all other computer games seem to, Napalm also seems to cheat. How else could the enemy keep on repairing a building for over an HOUR when they had no means of gaining more credits?
Speaking of credits, you get them in the usual way. Mine something and refine it. The substance in question in Napalm is simple oil. None of this made up crap like Spice and Tiberium etc. but I suppose that's partly due to the fact that the game is based on Earth rather than some distant planet no-one has ever heard of.
The terrain you play on is excellently drawn/rendered. It looks almost real at times, and the level of detail throughout the game is astounding. When the little men die, they tend to fall to the floor in 1 of 3 (or maybe more, I've only noticed 3) ways, blood spurts across the ground and after a while, gradually soaks into the ground and their limbs rot away. Lovely.
And the killing part of the game is particularly fun. There's loads of different types of unit you can use to spread your destruction, and even the men on this game are good to fight with, especially the flamer men who are on some of the screenshots in this review (if you're using the LhA download version, the screenshots are in the directory you found the review in).
Something that has been missed from a lot of games is the ability for a network game. And although Napalm doesn't yet have this facility, clickBOOM have saved a space for it so they can release an update which allows network play in the future. You can always have a game over the serial ports if you have two suitably enhanced Amiga's, or maybe even a PC with UAE.
Nice touches in the game include fake buildings designed to confuse the enemy so they start attacking the fakes while you build up suitable protection around your real base. You get air vehicles in Napalm such as helicopters, 'Antigrav' devices, and if you're playing on the side of the robots you get some truly brillaint units.
UFO's are excellently rendered units which fly through the sky. There are two types, supply and attack. The supply UFO brings reinforcments to your aid so you can heighten your attack on the ground, while the attack UFO hovers over the building you tell it to, while releasing deadly photon beams totally destroying the building in a stunning mixture of graphics and sound.
They've really thought of everything. Nuke missiles, camouflage for buildings, tunnels for underground travel to areas of the battle field, imaginative extraction of oil, and more. And hopefully, there'll be a lot of updates to this game, first to fix the apparent bugs such as the computer only saying 'unit ready' when a new unit stops moving. You can intercept a unit exiting the factory they were made in and theoretically move them across the level before the compter says 'unit ready'.
There's not many bugs, but the ones that are there are a bit niggly. The control system is OK, if a bit awkward at times, and the speech is very good. Overall, a true work of brilliance. If you have an Amiga powerful enough for it, then buy it. If you don't have an Amiga powerful enough, then buy one.
More screenshots