M.A.X. 2 (Strategy War Game)
Sometimes it seems as though someone changed the old rules of computer gaming when I wasn't looking. Sequels used to be based on the simple concept of "bigger and better." After all, it wasn't exactly like starting from scratch; designers had a chance to throw in all the cool stuff they couldn't squeeze in the first time around. Unfortunately, the buzzwords for sequels now--especially in war gaming--seem to be simpler and more streamlined.

The original M.A.X. from Interplay was a solid war game. It had a few problems when it was first released, but it was still fairly deep for the base-building, resource-gathering genre. When I heard Interplay was planning a sequel, I had high hopes that we'd be seeing an ambitious game with all the bugs ironed out. Silly me.

Look, Buzz! An Alien!!!!
M.A.X. 2 initially looks like a bigger and better sequel. The terrain engine is up to modern Total Annihilation standards, with smooth elevation grades, 3D units, and some nice combat effects. I have been through the game, however, and have yet to find battlefields as nice as the ones displayed on the box; and though each individual unit is competently rendered, when you take them as a group you are left with a fairly monotonous bunch. The alien forces are especially bad; most of them look like they were designed in the mashed potato factory.

And this is really my main problem with M.A.X. 2's alien enemy motif: it's uninspired. The alien Sheevat are just another bunch of those boring techno-organic goobers we see in just about every other RTS game. They actually have fewer units than the humans, and too many are directly analogous versions of mundane human units. (Somebody was feeling the pressure from StarCraft, that's for sure!) I was even amazed at how banal the human forces are. The only real changes from M.A.X. is the incredibly lame premise that all those cool corporations and factions from the first game allowed themselves to be bonded with different alien species from something called the Concord. What are the results of this highly unlikely idea? Pretty much the same set of faction advantages from the first game and a minor graphical and power level change for the units. Around this point I started to feel like they just mailed this one in.

Single-player combat is quite a bit more inspired and can be challenging, despite a generally timid computer opponent. As in the original game, the emphasis in M.A.X. 2 is on battlefield information as much as on firepower. Radar is still the most useful device in your armory, which is a nice change from the RTS standard of all-powerful visual sighting. In M.A.X. 2, line of sight is tricky at times, and even radar is thrown off by elevation and cover (such as trees).



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M.A.X. 2 (Strategy War Game)
The combat engine is still based on that whole rock-paper-scissors school: units are vulnerable to some and invulnerable to others. (In other words, ground-attack planes can butcher tanks and infantry at will, but blow up nicely if confronted by units such as a AA battery or a fighter jet.) The problem with the computer opponent--and this little flaw turns many of the scenarios into long, tedious searches for hiding aliens--is that it seems to calculate its attack possibilities one unit at a time. So instead of rushing you with the five Corvettes it has facing your battleship, the computer acts like each one attacking by itself would get badly hurt--and so all five flee, one after the other. The computer opponent is much, much more aggressive when it discovers you have left yourself vulnerable to a certain unit type; that's when it will happily slaughter you.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the resource model and base-building system, M.A.X. 2 careens back into the "barely trying" category. The original game attempted to make surveying and mining an intrinsic part of your whole strategy and a major factor in how and where you built your base. M.A.X. 2, on the other hand, has thrown depth out of the window to bring things more in tune with that whole WarCraft state of mind. Certainly, this sequel has a more streamlined resource and construction model; it's just too bad it's less interesting and original.

M.A.X. 2

Interplay, 800/969-4263
Price: $40.00



Pentium-133, 16MB RAM, 80MB disk space, 2X CD-ROM, Windows 95,
DirectX 5.0, 1MB DirectX-compatible video card 

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