Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command

March 17,2008 - The Warhammer 40,000 franchise has been around for a while now and has seen many spin-offs. Developer RedLynx has brought the series to the Nintendo DS with Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command. All that can really be said about it is that the game is a pile of…mediocrity. You didn’t think we were going to say that, did you?

As big as the Warhammer universe is, the game does a horrible job presenting itself to players. You take control of a group of space marines as invading Chaos soldiers start to attack. Throughout the course of several missions, you will control up to six soldiers against your foes. There are no real cutscenes or good enough reason to why you are doing what you’re doing. Essentially fighting for the sake of fighting, you’ll be bogged down with blandness.

By default, your actions will be presented on the touch screen with an accompanying map provided on the top. You can change this prior to playing and mid-game, but you will be better served if you keep it on the default settings. One of the major issues with the game is the lack of a grid to control your men. It wouldn’t be much of an issue if the soldiers were any easier to control.

You are always in control of any given soldier, which presents problems if you aren’t careful. If you want to use the d-pad or stylus to look around the map, be sure not to press a button or double tap by mistake because you may end up sending your soldier in the complete opposite way of which you were intending. Don’t worry about this if your soldier is out of moves, but keep it in mind if that isn’t the case. The lack of grid also hurts the ability to know just how far you can go. Granted, there is a counter, but you may not always be able to move just one step ahead if you want. And you can forget about even trying to move the entire squad. You don’t even want to bother with those problems.

Squad Command isn’t the prettiest of games on the technical side either. The sound is cheesy and you will be better off turning down the sound and throwing on some music to at least make the unnecessary experience somewhat entertaining. The graphics, even for the DS, are sub par. Details are almost nonexistent and it doesn’t seem they even attempted to try. The vision problem hurts the control problems even more. There are some online functions within the game but they aren’t any more enthralling than the rest of the game.

There really isn’t much else to say about the game. It is a mind-numbing experience that will leave you with a sour taste in your mouth. If you’re a fan of the tabletop game, stick with that. You don’t want Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command to ruin your views of the universe.

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