RogueyWon's Journal: Retrospective: Battle Isle series

I'm not much of a retro-gamer, really. By and large, I'm happy to have the latest shiny, commercially developed game to distract me. However, I do get the occasional urge to play an old game from my youth; urges which GoG.com tends to make it remarkably easy to satisfy.

I got one of these urges towards the back end of last year, as a result of which I found myself replaying some of the games in Blue Byte's Battle Isle series. Actually, I should qualify the word "replaying" - while I put a lot of hours into these games in my teens, I was never able to complete even one of them. Just about getting to the half-way point of their campaigns was as much as I could manage.

These are fairly obscure games, so I guess that I'd better stop at this point and give a bit of history. The Battle Isle games started out as hex-based turn-based strategy games. If you've ever played Nintendo's Advance Wars series, then you will have a very basic idea of what the game-structure was like, though Battle Isle was substantially more sophisticated than the later, portable offering.

At any rate, the first three games in the series all fit into this mould quite neatly - though not without some variations. The original Battle Isle, as well as its spin-off Battle Isle 93 (whose name serves to date the series quite handily) focussed on 2-side battles, either between a player and the AI, or between two players. Aside from a bit of background exposition in the manual setting out a war between the Drullian people and the rogue AI Titan Net (basically Skynet), the games were basically plot-less. In this first installment, both players would be acting simultaneously; one player in a "movement turn" in which he would move his units around the map, the other in an "action turn", in which he would order his units to attack, repair each other and so on. When the turn ended, any battles that had been queued up by the "action turn" player would play out on-screen and the roles would then reverse for the next turn.

While the split-turn system is interesting (and a lot of fun with two players huddled around a single PC), the original Battle Isle is of relatively little interest today. The maps are small, the range of units is quite limited and there's no narrative to the campaign, which is just a series of disjointed missions pitting the human player against ever greater numerical odds. Where the series was got really fun - and where I started in earnest with my replay, after a cursory scan of BI1, was with the sequel.

Battle Isle 2 was in some senses a more traditional turn based strategy than its predecessor. The split-turn system was gone, in favour of a round-robin system for turns, with both movement and action taking place in the same turn (for those units which could both move and fight on the same turn). This did render the game a little less distinctive, but it also allowed for more complicated 3+ faction battles.

Which is a good link into the next big twist that BI2 brought to the table - proper storytelling. The campaign was now held together by a proper story. Cutscenes, with a mixture of CG and hand-drawn animation (which was impressive for the mid-90s) were interspersed between the missions, while "talking heads" would pop up during the missions themselves to encourage, threaten or inform the player. Mission objectives became more flexible, with the traditional conquest missions being supplemented by missions centred on evading or escaping from an overwhelming enemy force, or slipping through enemy lines to capture an objective. The story was nothing spectacular, but it was effective enough, particularly in the expansion pack, which focussed more on character development.

The battles themselves feel a little bit odd to the modern gamer. The hex-based, turn-based system is clearly a long way removed from today's fast paced RTSes. However, in some respects, the flow of battle feels more realistic than many modern strategy games. There's no base building - and only rudimentary resource collection. On many missions, the player's resources will be provided at a fixed rate throughout the mission and the player will need to make his starting forces (which are far more substantial than those typically seen in a modern RTS) make a lot of the running. Units gain experience as they survive battles (provided they inflict damage on the enemy in doing so) and experience has an overwhelmingly huge impact on their effectiveness; meaning that keeping veteran units alive is hugely significant. Experience can be carried between missions and used to provide free training for selected units in future missions. Units need to be kept supplied with fuel and ammunition and the player may need to use support units to build roads and rails to allow some units to advance, and use transporters to carry particularly slow units into battle.

BI2 greatly expanded the range of units available; air and naval combat (including submarines) were both included. Later missions would require the player to make complicated landing operations against well fortified enemy positions, using air support appropriately. Radar and jamming vehicles could help dispel (or draw in) the fog of war.

The AI was rather rudimentary in places. While it tended not to do anything obviously stupid, it suffered from over-aggression. It could generally be tricked into giving up strong defensive positions in favour of unwise attacks against the player early in each mission. Replaying the game as an adult, rather than a teenager, I quickly noticed that I could win many missions by creating a kill-zone composed of tanks supported by artillery, letting the enemy sacrifice its advantage by moving to me first (artillery and many other heavy units cannot move and attack on the same turn), then launching a counter-offensive once the initial storm had passed. A couple of the later missions have tight turn limits that force more aggressive action, but those do tend to present less overwhelming enemy numbers than the early missions.

BI2 has, in many ways, stood up pretty well to the test of time. The graphics remains clear and functional - though the (optional) 3d battle sequences haven't aged so well. The UI is very much a product of the DOS gaming era, but is among the better examples of its type. Keyboard control generally felt better to me than mouse input, but I could get by with either. The expansion pack adds more units and a bit more variety in terms of mission objectives. Having played through both of them (and certainly found the later missions of both the base game and the expansion to be challenging but not infuriating), I actually enjoyed them hugely. This isn't a game you can play in short bursts - later missions may last 6 hours or more and need substantial concentration - but it's challenging and rewarding.

Battle Isle 3, however, is an odd beast. The basic game formula has changed remarkably little since BI2, but this is a game that feels very much a product of its time. It suffered from two big problems with its timing; one affecting its interface, the other its reception. The latter (and - for the retro-gamer - less serious issue) related to Command & Conquer, which released almost simultaneously with BI3 and turned PC strategy gaming on its head. Nobody was much interested in hex-based gaming at a time when C&C had shown what could be done in a more free-flowing, dynamic system with a decent drag-click interface and multiplayer (things which Dune 2, while also revolutionary, had lacked).

The interface issue was serious at the time and feels even more serious in hindsight. BI3 launched just at the time when PC gaming was starting the transition from being primarily DOS based to being primarily Win3.11/Win95 based. It was a Windows game, which recommended Win95 (but would run at a pinch under 3.11). It had an interface that probably felt, at the time, like the future. Rather than a single game-screen with pop up menus available when required, everything moved into lots of little windows - none of which could be maximised (and which it was very difficult to get comfortably positioned). You had the map in one window, the minimap in another, unit info in a further window and further windows for looking inside buildings and transports. Control was now mouse-only and involved a hell of a lot of clicking. In short, despite some enhancements to the 3d battle sequences and the option of using higher resolutions, the whole thing was a mess.

This was exacerbated by the decision to use FMV cutscenes, which were very much the rage at the time (think Command & Conquer, Wing Commander 3, Rebel Assault and so on). Unfortunately, Blue Byte never had the budget to do these well, so they settled for doing them badly. Dreadful acting, tinfoil costumes and cardboard sets dominate. To make matters worse, the cutscenes were clearly recorded in another language and then dubbed - badly - into English. The horribly accented English dialogue doesn't even vaguely synch to the characters' lip movements. The story being told is actually quite good - more complicated than BI2's, with shifting factional and individual loyalties that put me somewhat in mind of something like Gundam Wing - but the execution is so horrible that it can be hard to focus on it.

All of this is a bit of a pity, because the game at the heart of BI3 is actually pretty good. It doesn't overhaul the BI2 formula, but it does evolve it nearly in several places. The player now carries individual units (which can be named) between missions, with their experience intact - an even better incentive to keep key units alive. The AI was only tweaked rather than fundamentally rewritten, but the design of the missions made it much harder to exploit the known flaws in the AI's play. New units were interesting; many of the new units were unique to the player's army (ancient superweapons) and extremely powerful; but slow moving and impossible to replace mid-mission.

BI3 is a much harder game than its prequel - while the first few missions are fairly gentle, from about mission 5 or so (out of 20), the game throws very rapidly escalating odds at the player. If you can get past the UI and presentation issues and focus on the gameplay, this is an extremely enjoyable game. However, those are some pretty high hurdles to jump.

With its fourth installment, the series went for a radical departure. Battle Isle 4 - also known as Incubation - completely abandoned many of the concepts of its predecessors. While still a turn-based game, it was focussed on small squad tactics rather than strategic battles. Think Laser Squad - or the tactical sections from the X-Com games. At the time, a lot of fans of the series were horrified; with the growing dominance of the RTS genre, Incubation sent a strong signal that the days of the hex based strategy game were over.

Except that if you take it at face value, Incubation is an extremely good game. Its plot links to earlier installments in the series are thin (though they do exist), but it delivers a very different type of experience and does so very well. This is a game that has Aliens very much in its DNA - the player is controlling a small number of marines as they fight through an alien-infested colony, seeking first to investigate, then to attack and finally just to escape.

The FMV cutscenes are gone, replaced by game-engine scenes which, while dated technologically, are at least passable. The voice acting is much improved. While the game lacks the strategic planning side of the X-Com games, its tactical game benefits from being entirely designed, rather than randomly generated, allowing for some very clever mission design (and some intelligent puzzles). It's a tricky, unforgiving game with a steep learning curve, that requires the player to work out which weapons to use in particular situations quite quickly. Enemies are fast, relentless and, on many missions, will spawn indefinitely until and unless their spawn points are destroyed. The expansion pack goes a bit too far, being difficult to the point of near impossibility. But this is also a rewarding game. It throws a lot of variety at the player. There are some impressive bosses in the final missions, and interesting new weapons come available right the way through the campaign.

So while the game was received with horror by many series fans at the time of its release, it's probably more accessible than any of the other titles in the series to a modern gamer willing to look past its graphical deficiencies.

The final game in the series stepped back to its macro-strategic routes. Battle Isle 5: The Andosia War was a strange beast. It was a turn based strategy game, albeit one which abandoned the hex-based grids of the first three games in the series. It also incorporated a few real-time elements. In theory, it could have been great.

Unfortunately, it released in 2000, at a time when the strategy genre was going through something of a difficult transition, as it worked out how to adapt to the trend for 3d graphics. A lot of strategy games of this particular vintage hadn't yet worked out that in most cases (with honourable exceptions such as Homeworld, which I may post some thoughts on another day) the best way to treat 3d was as a purely graphical enhancement. Total Annihilation (to my mind, one of the best games ever made) worked this out. Later titles such as Warcraft 3 also worked it out. But a lot of strategy games at the time thought that they needed to give the player full - and horribly convoluted - camera control. BI5 is no exception. As such, controls and UI are a bit of a nightmare. Worse, it often feels like the core gameplay had been compromised in favour of technology. Despite being turn-based, this feels much more like the standard "build base, build army, steamroller enemy" flow of many RTSes. To my mind, it's a weak post-script to the series (despite some neat touches, such as the comic book-style cutscenes).

The Battle Isle games are available for a few dollars via GoG.com - the first four installments (and all of their expansions) are available in one package. Andosia War is sold separately. These games aren't going to be for everybody; they have a steep learning curve and don't provide even the slightest measure of instant gratification. However, if you're interested in checking out an obscure and still highly playable slice of gaming history, then the 1-4 package is very much worth a look, particularly given GoG's prices and admirable DRM-free ethos. Andosia War is perhaps harder to recommend as a stand-alone purchase - I'd suggest checking out the earlier installments in the series (particularly 2 and 4, which are excellent) first.