Luke Percy from nzgamer.com reviewed the PC version of Carrier Command.

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The main control of the game is through a top down radar map, where all the gameplay action is displayed in a small window in the top right corner of the screen. All your orders are performed by setting waypoints with contextual motivations of the units via a radial menu: these include commands such as "defensive", "offensive", and "protect" - etc. By sending units to various buildings on the map, you can take control and use them to build more units or gather further resources.
Because you have to gradually collect various resource and production buildings, it can take quite some time to get into the main part of the gameplay. Be prepared to sit down for at least one to two hours just to get two or three Walrus on the field, and almost twice the time again to start producing air units. But, once the core elements are in place, the game can get quite addictive.

Each mission features dynamic weather which affects the terrain, varying from tropical sun to snow blizzards and rain, so when your Walrus is treading mud in a rainstorm, it's time to upgrade to the Manta and attack from the air - but watch out for lightning! All of which adds a dynamic element to the strategy of any given situation.
There's no multiplayer... none. This game could be really awesome to play against friends, but unfortunately it was not on the cards for Bohemia. I’m crossing my fingers for a Multiplayer DLC in the future, as I think Carrier Command: Gaea mission would get some serious online time if it was available.


Carrier Command: Gaea Mission shows that Bohemia are real fans of the original game, and they have managed to reboot an 80’s classic in a way that I believe no one else could pull off as successfully or with so much care.

Score: 7.4

Bohemia Interactive announced Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is now available in stores worldwide for both the PC and the Xbox360!

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Prague, Czech Republic, Tuesday 2 October 2012

To celebrate the long-anticipated release of Carrier Command: Gaea Mission, Bohemia Interactive has just shipped the game’s launch trailer. As of today, Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is available in stores worldwide for both Windows PC and the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft.

Based on the groundbreaking classic from 1988, Carrier Command: Gaea Mission offers a blend of first- and third-person vehicular combat with tactical and strategic elements. In a massive sandbox, consisting of 33 unique islands hosting 6 distinct climatic zones, players are put in command of a futuristic military carrier holding multiple remotely controllable and customizable units. By traversing the seas and establishing a strategic network of island bases for mining, production and defense, players will set sail for a titanic game of conquest.

“Carrier Command: Gaea Mission delivers everything I loved about the original, and much more”, said Marek Španěl, CEO and founder of Bohemia Interactive. “The action-packed, strategic gameplay, combined with the open environments and stunning visuals, make this a melting pot unlike anything else. It is one of those games, I and many passionate gamers like me have been longing for.”

Unlike the original, Carrier Command: Gaea Mission also features a story-based campaign. Here, players take up the role of Lt Myrik, a battle-hardened soldier of the United Earth Coalition who has been sent to Taurus to repel occupying forces of the Asian Pacific Alliance. Alternatively, people can go head on with a mode similar to the original Carrier Command, named Strategy Game. In this mode, players can set starting parameters such as enemy strength and available resources, which determine the difficulty and length of a game.

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is now available for £29.99 / €39,99 on Windows PC and £34.99 / €49,99 on Xbox 360. For more information about where to order the game, go to http://www.carriercommand.com/buy.

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Jonathan Lester from dealspwn.com wrote a detailed and informative review of the PC version of Carrier Command: Gaea mission.
In this review he digs deeper inside the skirmish mode of Carrier Command but also shares with us what he thinks of the campaign.

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Gaea Mission had a lot on its plate, and I'm delighted to report that its randomised Strategy (skirmish) mode delivers the goods.
I wish that I could say the same about the singleplayer campaign.

The Strategy mode is a pitch-perfect recreation of the original Carrier Command. It's your carrier versus the enemy in a battle to take over a massive sprawling archipelago of islands, which bristle with AI defenders, turrets and fortifications. Your mobile HQ can be ordered about from an intuitive map screen or steered directly in third-person view, enabling you to bombard the islands' inhabitants with withering firepower, granting you a satisfying feeling of absolute naval supremacy. Should you encounter the opposing carrier, a tense and exhilarating showdown ensues, rewarding you with the win depending on your custom victory conditions.

What should have been a tutorial followed by some exciting missions turns into a protracted and infinitely more annoying version of the Strategy mode: the same basic setup, but limited by linear progression and accompanied by some of the worst voice acting and least relateable characters on the market. The throwaway storyline involving a barely-explained conflict over a colony world, hackneyed scripting and pedestrian character designs are unbelievably generic to the point of laziness. A good singleplayer campaign should act as a showcase or highlight reel, but here, it's just a rehash of the skirmish mode sullied by noxiously awful drivel being pumped into your ears on a regular basis.

Score: 6/10

Here is a review of the Carrier Command: Gaea mission PC version by Harry Hughes from pc.mmgn.com.

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My anxieties were strengthened immediately upon entering the campaign, where the story kicks off with a few sequences of FPS action. After completing just a few objectives, however, the game made a sudden transition into a more strategy-based style of play. Perhaps the abruptness of this change is what forced me into a state of immense worry.
From here, thankfully, everything began to shift into place nicely. The RTS elements were gradually eased into the experience and soon, an incredible action/strategy hybrid came alive!

The game is both accessible and versatile: those new to the RTS genre can take control of their vehicles and learn the ropes before returning to the commander’s chair, or continue to control each individual unit. This opens up a range of different playing styles and possibilities, and might just redefine strategy gaming just as the original Carrier Command did so many years ago.

Having pinpointed the accessibility of this game as a huge positive, however, I feel obligated to report that a huge level of depth can be found with just a little experimentation with each unit and their different abilities. As such, while seasoned real time strategists may initially be disappointed with what Gaea Mission has to offer, playing through the campaign in its entirety will allow players to uncover a tactical game capable of competing with just about anything on the market.

For all the things this game does well, however, there is one big gaping hole in the experience which will frustrate players and leave a sour taste in their mouths: the path-finding of ground-based vehicles. While the complexities of pathfinding on three-dimensional terrain probably can’t be overstated, there’s no real excuse for AI-controlled units to be circling around as they struggle to comprehend their surroundings, let alone get from point A to point B.
Score: 8/10

Here is another Xbox360 review for Carrier Command: Gaea mission (I promise, some PC versions are up next) this time by Martyn from popbucket.co.uk

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Carrier Command splits itself between a real-time action and strategy game, where the overarching objective is to conquer and control islands. In this game you get two modes; the strategy game which is very similar in style and mechanics to the original game and you’ve got the campaign, which is story-driven and essentially a one long drawn out tutorial. And believe me, you will need to play the campaign first. With the huge amount of information to absorb, from customising your units, ways to fight the enemy and how to build up resources, production lines and defense, you’ll need to understand all of this if you’re to win.
Sadly they decided to start this mode with a horrid FPS section which gives off an incredibly bad first impression. The controls are very stilted and way off the smooth and tight controls that we’re used to. The soldiers’ AI is poor, the reticule doesn’t change colour to indicate enemy or friendly units, the interaction and direction prompts are pretty much non-existent and you can’t sprint or jump. Quite simply, any progress that’s been made over the past decade in the FPS genre has been ignored here. Thankfully this doesn’t last for long before you’re stepping into the aircraft carrier and start commanding units. This mode generally plays the same as the strategy mode but easing you in with the controls and you’re just directed more in what island to take over next, therefore I’ll skip onto the meat and bones of this game.

With a 33-island archipelago to battle over, the central point of this game is your carrier, from which you can deploy and dock up to four aerial units and four amphibious units. With full control over any vehicle at any time, you systematically work your way through each island’s mission to take them under your control. But you do need to plan what island you want to take as each has various perks and benefits that will help you build up your strength. These come in three forms: islands containing resources which in turn will help the islands with the factories build units. These production line islands will then be protected by the islands that offer defense. What you don’t want to do is take just take over factory islands, as with no resources you’re not going to be able to replenish your lost units and you’ll fail.
You also get to make decisions about your development priorities, for example, do you focus on improving your units weaponry or armour? What supplies do you give your units; something to the hack enemy command structure or perhaps a scanner to detect enemy forces? What will most effectively dispatch the enemy; rockets or lazers? You have a huge array of options available to you, almost overwhelming actually.

Score: 7/10

Sean Smith from godisageek.com reviewed the Xbox360 version of Carrier Command: Gaea mission.

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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

David Jenkins from metro.co.uk reviewed the Xbox360 version of Carrier Command: Gaea mission.

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Complexity comes in many different forms of course and in terms of storytelling, and even most of the action mechanics, Carrier Command is so shallow you couldn’t even float a rowing boat on it - let alone a sci-fi aircraft carrier. But in terms of the complexity of its controls, interface, and non-linear progression Carrier Command is like something straight out of early ‘90s PC gaming.
In fact Carrier Command’s roots lay deeper even than that, since the original game was released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1988. Back then it seemed a glimpse into the future, with a fully 3D world for you to explore - as you colonised a network of islands to create a supply chain capable of knocking out a rogue enemy carrier.

In its own way the story campaign is as ambitious as anything else in the game. But although Bohemia Interactive’s experience with ArmA (and DayZ) is useful when creating a giant open world environment their attempts at scriptwriting and pacing are painfully amateurish.

For the first hour or so you have to trot around an almost empty island shooting unthreatening robots and wandering down brown sci-fi corridors, in what to the unaware observer looks like the worst first person shooter since Daikatana.

It’s an inauspicious beginning, but as you commandeer an amphibious Walrus vehicle and steal a broken down carrier it still manages to convey an impressive scale to the impending action. Before long you’re making use of the overhead map to plot your course around the island archipelago and eventually controlling up to four Walruses and four Manta aircraft at once.

The story mode helps you out with objectives and strategic suggestions, only fully taking off the stabilisers halfway through, but the game is still more than happy to let you full flat on your face long before that.
Once you’re up and running properly the idea is that everyone stays at home in the carrier and the vehicles are all run by remote control, so that if they crash and burn you don’t. Since you can have eight active at once, all with their own complex waypoint systems and artificial intelligence routines, the overhead map ends up looking like an air traffic controller’s nightmare.

The interface is as intuitive as it can be, given what it has to do and the limitations of an Xbox controller, but that’s still not very intuitive at all. But that is kind of the point. If you can’t be bothered to learn how to play it then the game’s simply not for you, with Bohemia unwilling to dumb it down to reach a wider audience.

We haven’t even mentioned the huge freedom you have to customise the vehicles, turning them into fighters, infiltrators, anti-aircraft platforms, decoys, and transports. You have to manage the resources each island provides too, ensuring your carrier has enough fuel and that there are enough raw materials to build new vehicles and parts.

Hopefully by now it should very obvious whether this is the game for you or not. If all the talk of complex controls, open-ended gameplay, and unforgiving penalties doesn’t put you off then you’re in for a rare treat… literally. This is a game almost unique on consoles, and indeed on modern PCs. It’s a game that has no interest in mollycoddling its players, and one that dares you to learn its intricacies and tackle its seemingly impossible goals.

Score: 7/10

Bohemia Interactive have released the first patch for Carrier Command: Gaea mission.
This patch fixes a couple of issues with the game, here are the highlights:

• Save game corruption bug fixed.
• Improved stability.
• Various Walrus AI improvements.
• Numerous Localization fixes
• Various campaign script fixes and improvements.

Please note this patch is not compatible with previos saved games! When you apply this patch, you will be required to restart your campaigns!!
This patch is not for the Steam version.