Battlecraft
by Seah Boon Siew
Battlecraft, a well known strategy game for QBasic!
| You are in charge of an army. Can you lead them to victory? | |
| Basically, click on unit, move him, then attack. In order to complete a mission, the enemy
must be annihilated. There is no option to send a unit to a point. Each turn you have to manually move
each unit. Basically each mission plays out the same way. You use your units to attack the enemy, and you try to kill off all of them before they get you.
AI is not terribly smart, so it can make for a long game. The enemy will ignore your units sneaking
up behind them, and they don't run away. There is no way to heal your units, so you have to keep playing with them. This game is decently done. Very good, except some more options would have been nice. |
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| Clear backgrounds and units. Nice scenery. You might be spoiled for these graphics with some of the much nicer looking games out there, but for what this game is worth, the graphics aren't that bad. There is barely any animation, which is basically some kind of indication of an attack. The scenery is kind of nice. Each mission seems to have a different season to it, which is graphically ok, but does not make sense. Still this game utilizes its graphics more or less nicely. | |
| I would have liked to be able to tell a unit to go to a certain point. Instead I have to actually take each unit and move it slowly, turn by turn, until it gets to where I want it. This makes for a tedious game that gets old really fast. There is no documentation with this game, but the controls are simple enough. The mouse is used as in almost any strategy game: click on unit to activate, click on destination, click on target. Really simple, but as said before, it can make the game really slow and boring. | |
| PC Speakers, but utilized nicely. Every move and attack is emphasized with some kind of sound effect. Besides this there is nothing to hear, but the sound effects don't get in the way or sound too faint. It seems like a lot of care went in to making the sound work right with the game. | |
| It can be difficult in the later levels, with new units being revealed and the enemy becomes stronger. Strategy is actually something you will need. Decide how to place your units so that you can rotate them in and out of battle to avoid a quick defeat. Try to tilt the odds in your favor by never letting it be a fair fight. Use as many units as possible against as few of the enemy's units in order to guarantee victory. | |
| This game was fun initially, but then it became more of a chore to move the units around obstacles and things like that. For example, in mission 2, there are about 4 enemy units that won't try to go around the trees. You have to go to them in order to win. It is not fun to try to move your entire army around the forest. Besides that, the game is kind of hit and be hit. Not too much varied gameplay. | |
| This game could have been better in so many ways. It was pretty good for a QBasic effort. I found that game is directory biased. By that I mean that if the game is not specifically where it wants to be the game won't work correctly. I find this annoying since I don't like having millions of files cluttering my C: drive. Most of the game works fine though. The mission editor lets you save the file, but you can't play it afterwards! Also, there is a file missing. Story.bas does not exist in the .zip that I found. I am going to look for a different file to see if it has it. | |
| .zip file: 45KB |