Game Reviews

Z Origins

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Z Origins
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| Z Origins

You might have grown accustomed to being called a lot of colourful names if you play Call of Duty online, but it's hard to remember an actual game that repeatedly tells you, ”You're crap”.

Still, robot-scrapping strategy classic Z The Game came from the darkly genius minds of the Bitmap Brothers (of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe) fame, so we shouldn't be too surprised.

The PC critical smash from circa 1996 has been faithfully ported over to Android by Kavcom with precious little surface polish, but some impressive work turning the touchscreen into a mouse substitute.

Smart tactics

Unlike many of its real-time strategy contemporaries (think Command & Conquer), there's precious little tedious resource-management to deal with in Z Origins. Instead, provided you've seized control of a sector, any factories will automatically produce units for you every few minutes.

This allows you to focus on the main purpose of each of the 20 missions: dominating key strategic points with your red troops and then storming the blue enemy's base.

Soldiers are relatively smart, too, and capable of taking flags to control territories, picking up boxes of grenades, capturing vehicles, and engaging with opponents despite little interaction from you beyond picking a waypoint.

With the enemy AI being Skynet-smart, and quick to recapture areas you've left poorly guarded, you'll be thankful your Grunts need precious little instruction because you'll spend your time zipping around the map fighting on many different fronts.

Although the controls were a little glitchy at first, a recent patch means selecting units with a tap (or drawing a box to bring squads together) is a cinch.

Dude alert

With battles ranging across five different planets, from snowy wastelands to lava pits, there's a fair bit of variety too, even if the basic capture-and-assault formula remains fairly rote throughout.

Admittedly, the two comedy robot dudes that fill 30 minutes of cut-scenes between missions can get on 21st century nerves, but the robust and satisfying gameplay has aged fantastically.

It's a shame, however, that some save bugs still persist after the first patch, and the game has frustrating knack of crashing at crucial moments – normally, when you've forgotten to manually save.

Newcomers might want a lick of HD paint, but retro strategists will undoubtedly relish how faithful Kavcom has been to the Bitmap Brothers's original vision for the Z The Game universe, and how defiantly the frantic RTS gameplay has stood the test of time.

Z Origins

A retro RTS gem that, despite the occasional crash, is an essential purchase for strategy fans with a fondness for '90s humour
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo