The future is wrought with war. Humanity was brought to the brink of extinction, then rose up to eventually establish itself among the stars. What followed decades later were a series of interstellar conflicts, which left worlds shattered, as the oppressive Terran Alliance has conquered almost all the colonized worlds except one. The only resistance the Terrans face comes from the Northern Star Alliance, who have been beaten down and but not yet defeated. The Terrans have been locked in a deadly stalemate with the NSA, who erected shields to protect from orbital bombardment, forcing a ground war and allowing them one chance to fend off the invading forces. This is where the player comes into action in Ground Control II.

Ground Control II is sci-fi themed 3D real-time strategy game. If nothing else, the graphics in this game are among the best of any RTS to date. The decimated cities look appropriately menacing, as snipers and other dangers could be hidden among any of the buildings. Capturing victory points increases the number of troops that can be supported, but you don't necessarily have to capture all of them to win the game. Capturing means having your units stand at the area for a period until it changes to your control. Unlike many other RTS's, there is no resource gathering in this game, nor does the player have to construct any buildings. Instead, the player must capture landing zones and order reinforcements to be delivered through a dropship. Landing zones are perhaps the most important territories in the game, and taking all of them usually wins the game. The dropship even works as a handy, although temporary, weapon and/or spotter as it makes its deliveries. The dropship can also be upgraded with better armor, guns, or greater cargo hold among other things. What all this amounts to is a game that focuses completely on strategic troop management instead of base management.

Income comes in a form of points in relation to destroyed enemy units. Every enemy soldier or tank taken out by your forces is worth a number of points. Therefore, a player's strategy is immediately made clear: maximize your kills and minimize your losses. Terrain and weather play a huge role here. Rain will influence your units' line-of-sight. Units that fire from higher terrain gain an advantage, while soldiers hiding in forests gain a defensive bonus. Fortifying buildings and bunkers is critical to victory, since troops gain a significant defensive bonus when firing from rooftops and windows. Soldiers can be ordered to face out from different parts of the building, emphasizing the importance of line of sight. However, a problem that often occurs is that soldiers will sometimes become unselectable after barricading a building. They cannot be selected directly nor through drawing a selection box over them. This isn't much of a problem if the units are assigned to a group number, but it is if the player just needs to move one or two people around. The player will have to switch over to freelook mode and swing the camera around in order to see the troops directly, which wastes time in very fast-paced game.

It would have been nice to see a destructible environment. While all the buildings look blasted out, they are otherwise indestructible. The same goes for bridges. High-powered turrets, which are pre-built on the campaign maps, can be disabled, repaired, and acquired but never completely taken out of action. We also wished that there were a way to see how many soldiers fit into a building, like in some of the Command & Conquer titles. Unless the player memorizes how many soldiers fit into each building design, fortifying becomes a lot of guesswork. It is also difficult to get soldiers out of a building once it has been fortified. You can't assemble a bunch of soldiers together and perform a building raid to flush out enemy troops. The most effective way to get rid of them is with long-range vehicles. A minor AI issue causes some of the units to become unresponsive at times. We ordered units to move and had to reissue the order twice more before it registered. Similarly, we ordered vehicles to take out soldiers situated on the far side of a building. The units acknowledged the order but didn't move, so we had to manually put them into position to get a line-of-sight. There don't appear to be basic commands like telling units to patrol an area or protect another unit. Additionally, there were instances where a ranged units decided not to hang back with its buddies and tried to drive in really close to take out targets. While pathfinding is great, the AI could use a little bit more tweaking, as units have a problem with stepping out of the way to let other units through. This doesn't stop movement, but significantly slows it down, which causes real problems when reinforcements are needed quickly.

The single player campaigns are challenging and well varied. There is even a mission that looks like a sci-fi version of the D-Day invasion, and is expectedly hectic. The units are also varied, all with an alternate mode that changes their capabilities. The light infantry, for example, can change over to a stationary anti-vehicle mode. The alien units (The Virons) can combine together to form new units. The gameplay is generally very good, but the camera controls some getting used to. Players can switch between the fixed RTS camera or switch to freelook mode to rotate the map around.

The most impressive aspect of GC2 comes from its multiplayer capabilities. The support of drop-in gaming, which allows players to join in while games are already in session, completely changes the multiplayer dynamics around. It means that victories aren't always eminent, nor or defeats. GC2 also supports cooperative multiplayer, a feature that has been long requested by many in the RTS gaming community. Up to three players can join together and play through the single player campaign. The only drawback is not in the multiplayer itself, but the Internet player match up service, Massgate. Backed by the GameSpy engine, the interface is fine for finding random games and ladder tournaments, but is otherwise difficult and unintuitive when looking for specific games or people. There is no way to type in information. In order add people to our friends list, we had to scroll through an unsorted list of players until we spotted each other. The friends list doesn't appear to do much outside of allowing private chat windows to be created between the two. We then tried to create a private game, but it wouldn't show up on the main game listing. There was no way for us to type in specific game names or IP's to join. So, we decided to play on the public open servers for a while, which was fun, but felt like we were settling.

Ground Control II is a very well thought out game that gives many players exactly what they're looking for in an RTS game. There are a few glitches present, but nothing too significant. The gameplay is pretty solid and the multiplayer features alone make this game worth buying. Check it out and have a blast!