From SteamHi fellow Z fans. We're happy to announce that our first game update is now live!This update includes the following changes:- Intro videos and cut scenes re-enabled! We know this will please a lot of you who're fans of the original game. This was posted on the Steam forum./Bytrix developer 6 hours agoQuick UpdateHi Z Fans,We've been busy here at TickTock working on extending Z Steel Soldiers as well as getting it ready to ship on a few more platforms. We've been taking note of all the feedback we've received and are currently preparing an update for the game and also plan to spend more time fixing smaller issues over the coming months.Today we've pushed out an update to the game which now includes a crash reporting system. We are aware some users are experiencing crashes in the game and we have been unable to reproduce any of these on any of the machines in our office.

The new crash reporting system will intercept the crash and allow you to send a report back to us which will hopefully shed some light on the actual cause of the crashes so we can fix them before pushing out our next update.We're also looking at the technician issues, some of which we resolved with our last update but many people still have problems with them. We're hoping we can nont only improve the game with our next few updates but also make it work correctly for everyone on all systems.Thanks for playing:). Posted an hour ago on Steam.Source:Did someone say.

Document all the other weirdly-modified versions of Spore dialog boxesDarkspore, a new breed of Action-RPG! Collect, Customize, Combat! Darkspore creations. Oh wait, the new breed is already going extinct.

There are no discussions open in this forum yet. Start New Topic Ask about Z: Steel Soldiers Discuss your gaming experiences. Share your friend codes / gamer. PC / Computer - Z: Steel Soldiers - Medium Vehicles - The #1 source for video game sounds on the internet!

Those of our readers with a long memory and a few grey hairs mayremember the original Z, which was released way back in 1996.Although it was a real-time strategy game, Z replaced the nowtraditional harvesting and mining of games like Warcraft andCommand & Conquer with a resource system based on occupyingterritory.Back Once Again Capture The Flag?The newly released sequel Z: Steel Soldiers is much the same, witheach map split into several territories and players battling toreach the flags which control them. The more territories youcontrol the more rapidly you will gain credits to spend on newunits and buildings, and every battle therefore tends to begin witha mad dash to touch as many flags as possible, shortly followed bya chaotic mid-field scrum as the two sides clash and try to hang onto the territory that they have already grabbed.Once things have quietened down a bit you might find time to buildup your base, change your army from a disorganised rabble into awell-honed fighting machine, and start indulging in some actualtactics instead of just throwing troops into the grinder. Z is notgoing to appeal to the more sedate and thoughtful strategy gamersout there - if you sit back and expand slowly the enemy will beswarming into your base with hordes of robots and tanks before youknow what hit you. The only way to win the game is to hit hard andhit fast, then desperately try to regain control of the situationonce the initial tank rush is over.Charge! Let's get ready to rumble!At the heart of Z is a single player campaign featuring a linearprogression of thirty missions, linked by comic book stylecutscenes which look good but are mostly deeply unamusing. Someonemust have surgically removed the Bitmap Brothers' sense of humoursince 1996, because the jokes in the game usually fall fairly flat.Mission objectives vary from rescuing prisoners of war andescorting your commander through enemy territory to ambushingconvoys and capturing enemy buildings. This keeps the story movingalong nicely, with your commander Zod managing to break acease-fire between TransGlobal Industries and the MegaComCorporation, just when it looked like five centuries of war wasabout to end.

The good news is that he may have uncovered aconspiracy in the process. As with most real-time strategy gamesthough this is all fairly irrelevant once the shooting starts.Because of the way the resource system works you will have to grabas much land as you can just to stop the enemy from building up toomuch of an advantage, whatever it is that you are supposedto be doing.

The AI is bloodthirsty if a little uncoordinated, andif you let it get the upper hand it will keep throwing troops atyou until it breaks through.Your own units on the other hand are apparently a bunch ofpacifists. Even on the 'aggressive' behaviour setting they willoften ignore enemies, even when the tank next to them is gettingpelted with rockets. This forces you to keep an eye on all of yourtroops to make sure that none of them are being picked off by enemyartillery or helicopters, which makes things even more chaotic.There are also some irritating features, like the unstoppable airraids which infect your buildings with a virus that causes guns tofire randomly (often blowing each other up in the process) andcancels factory build queues, forcing you to waste time settingeverything up again once the virus wears off. The game is alreadypretty frantic at times, and the last thing you need is to beforced to babysit your units and mess around giving the same ordersover and over again.Bug Hunt Think cool, calm, relaxing thoughts. It's no use.Unfortunately this isn't helped by the game's interface, which isprimitive at the best of times. Thankfully a few more hot keys havebeen added in the latest patch, but even with the new found abilityto remove units from a group (ooh!) and select every unit ofthe highlighted kind currently on the screen (ooooh!), it is stillclumsy and requires far more effort than should really be necessaryin a fast-paced strategy game.Z seems to be lacking polish, and it was rather worrying when weopened our boxed copy to discover a little leaflet warning thatthere was a problem with starting the game up under Windows 2000,and suggesting you download a patch from the. Evenmore worrying was that at the time of writing the latest patchwasn't available there - you have to go andfrominstead - andthat even after patching the game still sometimes crashes withoutwarning.In fact, the supposed Windows 2000 problem also effects otheroperating systems, and it's hard to see how the beta testers couldhave missed it.

When you start the game the anti-piracy CD checksystem doesn't shut down properly and leaves the game itself in abackground window. Unless you click on the greyed out pane to bringit back to the front, the game just sits there without everloading. The new patch more or less fixes this ratherobvious flaw, as well as solving an issue with the pathfinding codefreezing the game up for a second or two when you give your troopsa complex movement order, and curing various other annoying littlebugs and gameplay issues which afflicted the out-of-the-box versionof the game.Land Ahoy! Innit pretty?One area where Z has been suitably polished though is the graphics,which are nicely detailed from the rolling terrain to the chunkytanks and helicopters and the satisfying explosions they producewhen they get blown up. Artillery shells arc gracefully through thesky while bullets rip past you and smoke and flames rise fromdamaged vehicles and buildings.The game's thirty missions are spread across six worlds, includingthe seemingly inevitable ice, desert and lava worlds as well aslush forests dotted with Mayan ruins. The terrain isn't just thereto look pretty though - taking the high ground will give you atactical advantage over your enemy, although you have to balancethat against the need to carry on expanding to capture moreterritory and so earn more resources.Most maps also include one or more bridges which can be repeatedlyblown up and repaired, and these often act as chokepoints betweenopposite sides of a river, allowing you to hold off tanks andinfantry by destroying or defending them. Amphibious APCs can beused to carry robots across rivers or lakes, but there are usuallyonly certain areas where you can drive in and out of the water.There is plenty of room for tactics here, but due to the fast paceof combat and the clumsy interface you will have to be quick andpatient to achieve anything much more sophisticated than a tankrush, especially during the anarchic opening stages of the game.ConclusionSteel Soldiers does a reasonable job of bringing the novel gameplayof Z to a modern audience, but it's far from perfect and couldprobably have used a few more weeks of fine tuning.

Even afterinstalling the patch it's still a bit awkward to control, and lacksmany of the interface niceties we have come to expect as standardin our strategy games since 1996. On the bright side the lengthysingle player campaign should keep you busy for quite a while, andthere are also a few maps available for multiplayer and AI skirmishgames, which can be fairly entertaining as well.If you like your real-time strategy fast and furious and don't minda few rough edges, this could be just what you were looking for.7/10.