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Great game. Ignore IGN and Gamespot reviews.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: July 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I first read about this game on Gamespot and IGN and had huge expectations for it on PSP and DS. I bought the game for the DS and found it to be a great turn based game which required strategy and a little bit of skill to master.

Once you realize the core concept, you can beat it pretty easily. The missions are fun and head to head with a friend is a challenge.

As with most games for me, there's little reason to play it again after beating it.

Great bang for the buck.

Above Average

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 20 / 22
Date: January 09, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Not to be too blunt, but this game is completely focused on the turn based combat. Your units do not gain experience, nor is there any kind of overlying campaign strategy or world map. While the game's scope is quite limited, it does manage to provide an excellent combat engine and some very fun engagements.

Before the mission, each of your units can choose the weapons that they will take into battle. All units have a default weapon with unlimited ammunition such as a bolter, the Warhammer equivalent of a submachine gun, and sometimes you can choose a secondary weapon. Many of the "secondary" weapons are highly explosive, and the environment is fully destructible. There are lots of walls and pipes to blow up, plus wrecked tanks and supply boxes, etc. The first few missions require you to use the terrain as it stands because you really don't have the firepower to reduce everything to a parking lot, but your arsenal will quickly expand to include rocket launchers, lasers, and other devastating weapons that can quickly turn everything poking out of the ground more than 6 inches to dust.

Your units have a certain number of action points that they can use each turn. Moving a certain distance uses up an action point, and each weapon has a base AP cost which the player can increase to get a more accurate shot. Your units can duck behind low walls and other objects, effectively preventing them from being fired upon. Oddly, ducking costs 0 AP, so you can stand up, use all your AP shooting, and then duck at the end of the turn out of harm's way. However, your opponent can do the same, and the environment does not lend itself towards static defenses. The longer you stay in the same place, the more likely your cover will be obliterated by a plasma cannon or some other nasty explosive device.

Aiming is handled nicely in Squad Command. When you move the cursor over an enemy, the game automatically changes to firing mode, or you can toggle firing mode on and off manually. The game draws a direct line from your unit to the target, and the color of the line indicates the relative accuracy of the shot. Green is high accuracy, yellow is moderate, and red is poor. A black line indicates that you have no direct line of fire, although if the enemy is several screens away it can be difficult to see exactly what is blocking your shot. Additionally, the game shows you the possible level of innaccuracy in the form of a wide arc on either side of the line. As you increase your accuracy by spending more AP, you can watch this arc become thinner and thinner. Overall, the game does a very good job of giving the player the tools to evaluate the quality of any given shot without causing a great deal of unintentional mistakes or friendly fire.

I think everything that is in Squad Command is well done. It's the things that the game left out that are the real disappointments. For instance, during the opponent's turn, the game does not focus the camera on the enemy, so quite frequently you just get a message that your unit was killed by Chaos forces and you have no idea what just happened. The 2nd screen on the DS is particularly helpful here because the map is always displayed on the top screen so you can at least see which unit is moving even if you can't scroll fast enough to see what happened.

The single player campaign only lets you play as the space marines, which leaves a large amount of the Warhammer franchise unused. There are no space Orks or Eldar, etc. which would have been nice but is obviously out of the scope of this game. On the bright side, the space marine faction seems fully developed, allowing you to use tanks and other vehicles along with recon and standard marine units.

For the most part, the combat engine is good and I'm not disappointed with it. But the fact that it composes the entirety of the game is a little bit of a letdown. Just like Rebelstar Tactical Command on the GBA, this game feels more like a proof of concept that a full title. There is no unit experience and your marines don't carry over from mission to mission. There's no world map or base of operations, no equipment management or soldier statistics. At the end of the day I'm still left asking why a game released in 2007 has fewer features than a game released in 1993. As it stands, Squad Command is not a bad deal at $2 per mission, but the game won't last you a long time unless you are really zealous about the multiplayer. Hopefully in the near future we can see a combat engine like this implemented in a game with more features, and more Warhammer factions.

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