This review originally appeared on Reviewcenter.com in 1999.

We reviewed the PC version, but it was also released on PlayStation. Click here to download the original demo!

Taylor’s review

When I first saw the box for KKnD 2 Krossfire, I thought “Wow, this game doesn’t look that bad!”

Little did I know how wrong I was. Installation was probably the best part of this game — smooth and quick with no restart afterward.

Even the opening movie was informative and actually looked good, but this is the only part of the game that has good graphics. The rest of the game did not impress me at all.

The graphics, in my opinion, were no better than Command & Conquer, which is 3 or 4 years old. Why they didn’t try to the improve graphics is beyond me. With such games as Command & Conquer 2: Tiberium Sun coming out soon, you would think that they would want to get an one up on the competition.

KKnD2 Krossfire ran exceptionally well on my system, probably because of such of its low quality graphics etc. Levels took only a moment to load while the movies would only take a few seconds.

The Sound for KKnD2 Krossfire was nothing special. When you click on an unit, it makes the same sound every time you click on the unit. Not to mention that it makes the same sound for every unit for your race. Now, I don’t mean to complain, but hearing the same marine saying the same thing over and over and over again gets on my nerves and I found myself often turning down the sound because of this.

The gameplay is quite boring. There are almost too many units in this game. You cant even figure out what you are making as a unit sometimes. It’s such a stupid design for making a unit. You click on “Constructibles” then a submenu pops up and you choose a base (small, medium, huge) then pick parts. Unfortunately, there is no way to know what these parts do however. Then there is the control factor of these units. To select a unit you left click on it. To move a unit you left click where you want it to go. This is okay, except if you have a lot of units together, and you try to move a unit away from enemy fire, but accidentally click on another unit, the unit is toast.

Despite the genre, this game requires absolutely no strategy to play. It’s just get money, build units, die, build even more units, more, more, more. You get the idea. There is no balance in the units. It’ll take a million archers to take out one sentry gun. The only way to win is to mass-produce units from the very start.

There are only one or two units that can attack air units, so air dominance is key in this game. It kinda makes the game unfair because if you have air and the other person is still researching things to make anti air, they will never win.

To sum it up, if you really want to play a game that bores you, and needs no thinking at all, this is for YOU! If not? go play StarCraft, a much better game. [rating:2/5]

Stormy’s 1998 analysis/preview

I guess this must be a pretty popular game cause it comes in several languages, they are English, German, French, Spanish & Mandarin. (I think that is the first time I’ve seen a game available in Mandarin!)

There are two CD’s, one containing the installation and Survivor missions, the other containing the Series 9 and Evolved missions. When you start the game with disk one in, you must pick a Survivor mission. If you pick either one of the other two, the game will bounce back to the desktop, and that’s that. The only way to play the other two missions is to start with disk 2 in the drive, BEFORE you choose the mission. There will be no “please insert disk 2” prompt, which of course surprised the heck out of me, I thought the CD was broke.

The folks that wrote the instruction manual are aware that a lot of people don’t like to read manuals, so they wrote it humorous. Unless you already know how to play, you ought to get a kick out of learning how to play this game.

The game has 51 missions, and your objective is to gather resources to build your own buildings and fighting units while looking for the enemy so you can crush everything he’s got, in some of the missions, and in some of the missions your only objective is to kill. You can kinda tell right away, either you have the stuff to gather resources, (oil rigs, tankers, buildings, etc) or you don’t. If you don’t have all the extra stuff, then you gotta figure out how to kill the enemy with what you got, cause you can’t build any more. However, there are surprises lying around, there is buried 21st century goodies, and during a mission where I found myself with just one fighter, (he was a nasty one, but not invincible) suddenly I found a repair bay out in the middle of nowhere (thank god!) You can play this game alone or 2 people over Modem and Serial connections, or up to eight players on TCP/IP, or IPX.

Ye Olde System Requirements

• Pentium 133 or faster
• 16MB RAM
• 4X CD
• 2MB DirectX compatible video card
• DirectX compatible digital sound card

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