If you played the original Radio Commander, the Radio Commander: Pacific Campaign demo is sure to stir memories. Unfortunately, not all of those memories are likely to be happy ones.
Set during the Vietnam War, jungle-choked Radio Commander (2019) turned heads and wrongfooted tacticians with some of the foggiest fog of war the genre had ever seen. As in rival wireless-em-up Radio General, counters didn’t glide about magically when the units they represented moved. It was up to you to update your map by requesting contact and status reports at regular intervals. This vigorous nod to reality ensured tension, but because the game’s range of transmittable orders and questions wasn’t all that broad, and in-mission task triggers could be unreliable and confusingly communicated, Radio Commander’s linear campaign was sometimes frustrating.
I was hoping engine inheritors, Squadron Studio, would address these flaws, but the hour I’ve just spent with the demo suggests RCPC will blunder into many of the same ambushes as its predecessor.
In the Wake Island tutorial, a training skirmish that should have been over in minutes went on for twenty-four hours, possibly because I failed to position a platoon on a hill with sufficient precision. In the mission that followed, surprisingly short-lived friendly units and surrender-happy foes, slightly gamey secondary objectives, and an order palette missing useful options like ‘scout’, ‘split’, and ‘follow’ meant liberating Nauru wasn’t nearly as pleasurable or engaging as it might have been.
