Review by: Bob Mandel Published: March 25, 2002When a game release accomplishes its goals successfully and is widely accepted by the public, it is sometimes difficult to know what to do with a sequel. Such a dilemma was faced by the British company Rage in deciding what to do with the Incoming franchise after its incredibly successful debut in early 1998. This release was so far ahead of its competition in its gorgeous stunning graphics that several 3D accelerated video cards chose it to show off their new features. Aside from an underpublicized add-on pack -- Subversion -- released through a third-party, the millions of people who bought and enjoyed this breakthrough offering have been waiting an awfully long time to see what would come next. Now at long last, four years later, Rage has developed and released a sequel named Incoming Forces, a more refined futuristic arcade shooter. This sequel differs from the original in a number of crucial ways. First, in an intriguing twist, your goal is exactly the opposite of that in the original: in Incoming, you played the role of a human defending planet Earth from a rash of brutal alien intruders; while in Incoming Forces, you play the role of an alien warrior, the head of a defense force protecting a faraway planet from the onslaught of human enemies trying to destroy you. Second, Incoming placed a virtually exclusive premium on the reflexes and hand-eye coordination of the player, while Incoming Forces necessitates significant elements of both strategic thinking and flight simulation skill to achieve success. With respect to these last two issues, the influence of such hybrid offerings as Activision's Battlezone II and Bethesda Softworks' Echelon are clearly evident. The background story is a direct continuation of what came before. Set twenty years after the original Incoming, humans on Earth began to worry after the defeat of the invading aliens that another attack against them was a real possibility; and they decided they needed to take preemptive action rather than just passively wait around. Soon this paranoia, combined with a lust for revenge, led to the creation of a vast armada to search the universe for impending threats from hostile planets and to destroy them upon discovery. Eventually the human fleet arrives in your own neck of the woods, and you must thwart the human soldiers and keep them from accomplishing their mission. The result of all this is that all sympathy goes directly to the alien races in danger of being wiped out, not to the marauding group of menacing humans. The plot is intriguing enough for this kind of offering, with some twists exemplified at one point by your decision to fight alongside human rebels, angering your newfound alien allies. Incoming Forces is decidedly more story based that the original, as this new release is sprinkled with loads ofin-game engine cutscenes to help the plot progress and to update you on your objectives. This time around there are four distinctive planets, instead of just the planet Earth, which serve as the settings for the intense combat in Incoming Forces. The first planet you encounter, Life, is an agricultural world; the second planet, Core, contains natural resources and industrial production facilities; the third planet, Fantasy, is a recreational center housing the main civilian population; and the fourth planet, Fortress, is the site of major government military forces. Some locales are easy to pass through, while others are inordinately difficult. The diversity of these physical environments in both their appearance and their primary activity proves sufficient to make for a lot of different types of challenges.
|