Battlezone II: Combat Commander - Gameplay

Gameplay

Pandemic Studios continued and expanded the concept of a RTS and FPS hybrid where the player drives the vehicle in the game, but using a mixture of the reticle and the space bar, selects units and buildings to build and orders units around the battle field. The F keys at the top of the keyboard were used to create groups of units for easy selection of the units presently on the battlefield when they were not in the range of the player to select via the spacebar.

Battlezone II was not very popular, likely due to Pandemic Studio's attempts to blend two groups together; both styles of player had trouble adapting to the style they were unused to. Programmer Ken Miller said, "BZ2 was meant to do that at first, but headed in the opposite direction. The problem is that mixed-genre games only attract players that like both genres (the intersection) as opposed to either genre (the union). It mainly comes down to learning curve. Action/shooter gamers can pick up just about any action/shooter game on the market and play it in short order, as almost all of them use the same control scheme and feature similar gameplay conventions. Similarly, strategy gamers can pick up just about any strategy game on the market and play it, although strategy games tend to differ from each other more than action games. Confronting an action/shooter gamer with strategy or a strategy player with action tends to force them outside their genre "comfort zone" and requires a steeper learning curve. My pithiest, if somewhat unfair, summation is this: 'FPS players don't want to think; RTS players don't want to die.'"