Z (Zed) Review | Classic Retro Real Time Strategy Game
"For today’s review, we’re taking a rather large step back into the realm of the mid-’90s, 1996 to be exact. The year that saw the release of classic videogame titles like Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, Quake, Tomb Rider, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Civilization II and Diablo saw the release of yet one other title that doesn’t get as much laurels as it should. Maybe it’s because of it’s single-letter title or due to the fact that real-time strategy games hadn’t yet gotten as popular as they will later be.
Either way, today I’m taking a quick look at: Zed.
In Zed you control an army of robots to fight a differently colored army of robots in a real-time strategy environment. But describing the game in these terms, while accurate, doesn’t do it real justice since a lot of its appeal at the time, as well as now, also stemmed from its charm.
The gameplay is nothing special by today’s standards, when we play similar if not more advanced games on our mobile devices, but for 1996 standards this Red versus Blue precursor was quite the achievement.
Keep in mind that the only other main RTS title of the time was the original Command and Conquer and compared to that, Zed offered a rather different approach to real time strategy gaming. A considerably more complex and tactics-minded one.
Instead of busying yourself with resource gathering, creating troops and then tank-rushing the enemy, Zed sets you and the enemy in your own separate forts and sprinkles a bunch of vehicles, turrets and unit-creating buildings across the map.
Commandeering the turrets and unit-creating buildings is done by conquering as much ground as possible. You do this by sending your robots to capture the flags that dot each map. Each flag has a certain amount of surface area of influence it provides, once you have control of the flag, you also gain control of whatever else is located within its influence border.
There would be a few other features to mention on here but that’s the general gist of things, the rest is made up by the game’s charm.
I love it how the hillbilly robots in the cutscenes - who are under your command - have an actual tape deck in their SPACEship! And the devs were big on cutscenes, so we’re treated to one before and after each mission, you’ll get to see Brad and Allan quite a bit.
The music that the game sports is expectedly digital but I can’t shake the feeling of a late ‘80s - early ‘90s cop show from it. Fun stuff.
Then of course there’s the different types of robots you can build - each of them featuring their own funny lines with a very specific twang in their voices.
The game has a pretty nice learning curve, starting with both parts being equally matched and symmetrically positioned, to then bump up the difficulty by giving the AI certain advantages, thus making it a requirement to approach the missions from a much more tactical standpoint, as opposed to the more tank rushy approach.
Scrolling around the map is going to take a bit of getting used to, since the now-conventional WASD controls to move around the map wasn’t a thing back then. Instead, click in regions of the mini map will do the trick.
Zed has benefited from a very active community of fans that have been maintaining the game long past the official end of support date. Making it run on newer systems, digging through the code for unused assets and there was one project at one time called the Zod Engine - an open source remake of the original game engine.
You can find out more about Zed by checking out the Zed Zone site and forums.
And that’s about it for this blast-from-the-past episode, I hope you enjoyed it and found it informative.
Please don’t forget to upvote, resteem, comment and follow!"
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You can find Z on Steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/275530/Z/
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