With its breathtaking 3-D environments, Force Commander draws players into a real-time strategy that is wrapped in a story line intersecting with some of the greatest moments in the Star Wars epic. The game begins just prior to the Empire's search for the droids in Star Wars: A New Hope and ends after Return of the Jedi. Along the way, players experience firsthand the decisive Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back, plus several new locations and conflicts created exclusively for the game. The intense, real-time nature of the game, coupled with a classic Star Wars story, offers fans and gamers the chance to truly live the adventure. Unique to Force Commander is the opportunity to be a commanding officer of the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire.
This Star Wars real-time strategy game unfolds through a series of mission-based chapters and allows players to direct their forces from one of two campaign perspectives--as a leader in the Rebel Alliance or as a Galactic Empire commander. Each chapter takes place on a different world and contains an average of three missions. The missions span the Star Wars trilogy, beginning just prior to the destruction of the planet Alderaan from Star Wars: A New Hope and climaxing after the dramatic ending of Return of the Jedi. Mission objectives in Force Commander include establishing a base of operations, capturing strategic buildings and units, and the complete destruction of enemy forces. The game can be played in single-player or head-to-head mode using the Internet or local area network.

Star Wars: Force Commander is a traditional real-time strategy game that has fully three-dimensional graphics and a few original gameplay ideas. Most importantly, Force Commander intends to let you re-create the ground battle sequences from the classic Star Wars films by letting you take control of Imperial walkers, Rebel defenses, and more. Yet because of its dated graphics, ineffective controls, and flawed gameplay, Force Commander falls short of its ambitious intent; and because it's been so long in development, and so highly anticipated, it finally comes across as a disappointment.
Force Commander's 3D engine would have been considered state-of-the-art two years ago. The game can render a rather large quantity of animated units without slowing down, although the graphics won't ever move very smoothly even on high-end computers. Force Commander's 3D units range widely in visual quality; zoom in up close and you'll see that the towering four-legged Imperial AT-AT walker looks and moves with marked similarity to its counterparts in the famous Battle of Hoth sequence in The Empire Strikes Back. The flying units in Force Commander, which include Imperial TIE fighters and bombers, as well as Rebel snowspeeders and Y-wings, also look more or less exactly as they did in the Star Wars films. Unfortunately, most of the other structures and units are simple shapes that are lacking in detail, and the hilly terrain graphics are similarly unimpressive. And the game's flat, washed-out textures do little to bring the units or the topography to life. Moreover, all of the units change direction by rotating in place, which looks all right for the Rebels' treaded and hovering vehicles but not good at all for the Imperial walkers, which seem to slide in place.
Probably the most visually unappealing element of Force Commander's presentation is its onscreen interface. It's a plain rectangle that consumes about a third of the game screen, and though you can toggle it on or off (which takes an undue amount of time), the game is unplayable without having the interface bar's ugly displays readily available. The interface looks unfinished, and its various functions that let you build structures or change unit behavior are nondescript and counterintuitive. The slipshod interface graphics look surprisingly poor, but other than the sheer amount of space they take up onscreen, at least they don't really interfere with the gameplay once you memorize all the functions.
Unfortunately, Force Commander's 3D camera controls are a huge detriment to the game. The view defaults to a slightly raised perspective that shows your units up ahead in the distance. It's a nice angle to look at an AT-AT, but it's entirely nonfunctional for gameplay purposes. So instead, you're expected to pan, rotate, tilt, and zoom the camera until you find an angle that works. You can manipulate the camera with the mouse, or you can use the predefined keyboard keys to do so, but either way it'll take you a long time to figure out how to get the camera to move the way you want. Ultimately, you'll just end up zooming the angle as far back as possible and raising it high above your forces, such that the game's perspective mimics most every other real-time strategy game. You'll need to do so to see as much of the screen as possible, but in consequence, most units will shrink to a minuscule size. You'll have a hard time seeing them shooting at one another because the shots are so small, and the units themselves will be obscured by wire-frame selection boxes. In the end, you'll have to compromise between being able to control the game effectively and being able to see your 3D units clearly, which reflects Force Commander's compromised design: Aside from the occasional circumstances when terrain affects your units' line of sight, the game's 3D engine is a liability rather than a feature.
Force Commander also features a soundtrack that's at least as misguided as its 3D graphics. There's a good intent behind the game's techno remixes of the classic Star Wars themes. The composers recognized that Star Wars fans have likely heard John Williams' score one too many times by now, so they tried to work with the familiar Star Wars musical cues to create an original soundtrack. Unfortunately, most will find the results to be either silly or offensive: The drum loops and heavy-metal guitar chords just don't sit well with the classical strings and brass of the familiar soundtrack. Luckily, not all the music in the game got the techno treatment - but chances are you'll shut it off anyway, just to be safe. Force Commander otherwise sounds like most any other Star Wars game. The voice acting is generally quite good, though the unit acknowledgments are repetitive as in most real-time strategy games. Some of the sound effects in Force Commander are actually very well done, such as the distinctive whine of multiple TIE fighters in flight.
--Greg Kasavin
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