A half-decent attempt at duplicating Advance Wars (GBA/DS) but ultimately unsuccessful

User Rating: 1 | Field Commander PSP
By adamb2k4 | Review Date:
Game Itself: Almost IDENTICAL to Advance Wars for GBA/DS, but with pretty graphics. Very few differences between the two games. In fact, the maps in Advance Wars were much better, and the AI in Advance Wars was much more challenging. Essentially, both games are a ripoff of a 10+ year old game called Panzer General. I think that FC could have been much better had it adopted a lot of the (basic) functions of Panzer General, just not to a degree where it became overly complicated (Panzer General is an EXTREMELY sophisticated game). For example, defense ratings on the unit details screen. Little things like this were omitted from FC that could have added much value to the game.

Single Player: Way too easy to beat. Not much of a challenge. No replay value.

Multi Player: Frequently disconnected infrastructure games, inaccurate (easily exploited) ranking system, corrupted transmission games, unable to play on Sunday mornings (religiously). If you wish to play a challenging game you either take your chances (against the majority of players that will disconnect when losing, sometimes after HOURS of gameplay) or waste much time attempting to hook up with the (very few) honest, challenging players (kind of boring to play the same people over and over).

The game was not thoroughly tested/developed when it was rushed into the market. You can see this by the myriad of complaints on the official Field Commander forums about problems with multiplayer. In addition, the community on these forums is frustrated to the point where they will (hypocritically) verbally attack anyone that complains about these problems not realizing that, without any complaints, there is no chance of SOE ever even noticing. They will also attack you for discussing anything remotely off topic of Field Commander, or for posting anything remotely negative about the game. Unfortunately, these are the people you need to hook up with, personally, on instant messenger, in order to play with (and most of them are rarely online at the same time) without having to worry about cheaters (disconnecting when losing).

The cons far outweigh the pros, when all is said and done. Spend your hard earned money on something more worthwhile, like a well developed PC game. For now, PSP doesn't have a TBS game worth paying for IMO. Some people have spent the money and are stuck with it and try to make the best of it. Others have spent the money, are stuck with it, and continue to complain in hopes that Sony will notice. Others had the game paid for by their parents and so they don't really care about anyone but themselves. Others run illegally obtained copies of the game off their memory stick with emulated firmware and cause even more multiplayer issues (and ultimately cause the prices of games to go up).

Anyone that praises this game as much as they do, either doesn't have any desire to play multiplayer, or simply wants to bait you into buying the game so that there are more choices of people to play with on Sonys broken server.

Gameplay: 7 because it fails to match or even surpass its competition (Advance Wars)
Sound: 7 because while nice, it gets repetitive, but so do most other games
Graphics: 8 very nice graphics, but the lack of ability to zoom into units (only rotating map) adds unnecessary turn time (and eye squinting)
Value: 1 because Sony fails to deliver a finished product, and has not addressed any of the multiplayer issues since the games release

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