You may not think of it to look at the sort of stuff I usually play, but Carrier Command holds a special place in my heart. Rainbird released Realtime Games’ groundbreaking strategic vehicle sim in 1988, a game where you take control of a near-future robotic carrier in a battle for the ages with an opposing, superior, more tricked-out enemy craft, over control of a series of islands. It allowed you to play in two different ways, the full-on “Strategy” mode, or a more simple, action-oriented “Action” mode. For the time, the game had an outstanding sense of immersion, whichever way you played. Your carrier is crammed full of features, including remotely controlled vehicles that can be used to attack the enemy, colonise islands or even infect enemy-occupied isles using biological warfare to flush them out. You have to pay attention to your fuel, your shields, your weapons, your decoy flares. It is a tortuous, but rewarding affair. When it was released it received universal acclaim across the board. This was in the days before the internets existed and allowed people like me to write things like this, a time when the magazine was King. Publications I used to purchase regularly as a kid like Crash and Zzap selected it as their Game of the Year, heralding it as a classic and speaking about it in the same breath as Elite and Starglider.

I managed to save up enough pocket money to get the game for my Commodore C64. It was a terrific game, but was the version of the game without the brilliant 3D vector graphics, with the action taking place on a top-down map. Even the bloody Spectrum version had the cool 3D carriers, so I was a bit miffed in that respect. Luckily, around that time, I was spending a lot of my days staying at my Aunt & Uncle’s address. They were loaded, and my cousins had an Atari ST. I remember spending hours playing Carrier Command with my older cousin Lee, that and Wizball, and later on Ocean’s fantastic Untouchables tie-in. It is funny what you remember. Owing to the splintered nature of my family, I seldom saw my cousin in the ensuing years, until I bumped into him out of the blue in a pub eight years later. We spoke about old times, about how we used to play video games together, about family memories good and bad. We both remembered the ST and that pesky enemy carrier.
So when I learned that Bohemia Interactive’s years-in-development reboot was available for review, I decided to step outside of my comfort zone and take a look. My taste in games may have changed over the years, but this was a chance to look at what a big-name modern developer could do with what was a landmark, era-defining retro game, that I remembered so fondly.

Score: 8/10

Tags:Review, Xbox360

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