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Rating: Average Total Annihilation is a real-time strategy game that I bought with great anticipation, hoping that it would be even more fun than the all-mighty Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Boy oh boy was I disappointed. Graphically, Total Annihilation looks good, but really not that much better than most other real-time strategy games, and nowhere near as good as had been hyped. Sound-wise, there are no clever voice-overs when you click on a unit to give it a command. Instead, you're lucky if you get a mechanical clanking noise when the unit starts to move. The orchestral music conveys the sense of an epic battle, but it really sucks in comparison to the cooler, hipper music in Red Alert. Total Annhilation has over 150 units to play with, but many of them are so alike another unit that the actual number of unique units is less than half the advertised amount. That's still a lot of units, but the wealth of units does more to confuse the player as to what he should be building than anything else. The battles are slow-paced luck-fests that are put to shame by Red Alert, and the resource management system just sucks. Instead of money that is harvested by ore trucks, Total Annihilation automatically charges "energy" based on how many energy buildings you have. This completely eliminates one major stragetic part of the real-time strategy game formula and is one of the biggest mistakes the developers made with the game. Another mistake was the feature of the "Commander," a single unit that each side starts with. The Commander can devastate enemies with his big gun, and is used to construct the buildings that make up your base. However, the Commander ends up being useless as an offensive weapon because he can be easily ganged up on and killed, and if that happens it's automatically game over. The developers should have let the game go on when you lose your Commander. You would still be at a severe disadvantage without him since you could no longer build any structures (as is the case when you lose your construction yard in Red Alert), but the game should still go on. The 3D line-of-sight feature sounds good in the instruction book, until you realize it is just an annoying effect that prevents you from seeing your enemies until they're right in front of you. The units move so slow that it is nearly unbearable. I understand that some units should move slower than others for the balance of the game, but come on! Not that slow! Organizing massive attacks in Total Annhilation is a nightmare, because your units' pathetic Artificial Intelligence will frequently result in you telling a group of units to go to a certain spot on the map, and then some of the units go off in one direction, others slowly crawl towards the destination you told them to go, and others seem to just wander around like idiots. If you want a good real-time strategy game, Total Annihilation is not it.
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com