R-Type Command

Take a beloved side-scrolling shooter, slap a hex grid on it, slow it down to about chess speed and you get something like R-Type Command, a turn-based strategy thinker and total U-turn for Irem's 1980s arcade classic. In the 22nd century, humanity has a bone to pick with the insect-like alien race from the arcade game--called the Bydo--and sends waves of fighters into Bydo space, only to lose them all. In a last-ditch attempt, a lone commander convenes a small armada of fighters and launches a suicide sortie to infiltrate and assault the Bydo Empire at its core.

In the 1987 arcade original (called simply R-Type), players piloted a 22nd-century fighter through side-scrolling levels, dodging flickering projectiles and blasting eerie arthropod-like creatures in an attempt to penetrate and "strike the evil Bydo Empire." R-Type Command maintains the side-scrolling vantage but divides the game flow into turn-driven phases, adding the option to eventually play as either the human or Bydo side. After selecting ships and assigning them pilots in a preload area that includes "how you're doing" stats and the option to R&D new tech, you deploy your armada in a restricted area at one end of a hex-lined map.

Play proceeds in alternating turns during which each side moves and attacks while performing supporting maneuvers like resupplying and repairing, all the while navigating around tactical obstacles like mines and asteroids or planet-side complications like cavern walls and industrial enclosures. Each ship has special abilities and can be upgraded by locating objects on a map and securing them before the enemy does. Some ships have additional capabilities, like the option to create explosive decoys, shift in and out of faster "desynch" space, salvage research-boosting resources or attach to other units to access new weapons. Mission parameters occasionally vary, but most entail destroying the enemy's flagship. If yours is destroyed first, you lose. If you win, your destroyed ships are automatically returned to your armada for subsequent missions.

R-Type Command is frustratingly unbalanced.

The trouble with R-Type Command isn't its monotonously electric-aquamarine visual fetish, which makes the game feel like someone jammed a couple florescent lights in a dirty swimming pool. It's not the annoyingly long-loading 3-D battle animations you can easily disable (and should), or the time it takes for the computer AI to do its business (a mere dozen seconds or so if you increase the animation speed to "fast"). It's not the fact that you have to slog through roughly 30 missions before you can finally play the technologically distinctive alien Bydo campaign. No, the biggest problem with R-Type Command is that it gets its guns-to-missiles balance fatally screwy, making the game much too easy to exploit and simply bang through.

I'm talking about one unit in particular, the bomber, which comes stocked with the incredibly destructive Balmung nuke. Lob one of these at the enemy from a safe distance and you'll lay waste to ships with hundreds of hit points in a turn or two, or outright vaporize squad stacks (they come in "fives") entirely. The bomber's only able to carry one Balmung at a time, but paired with a resupply unit that can follow and furnish supplementary nukes on the fly, the bomber so dramatically unbalances missions that you'll often be able to finish the highest-difficulty sorties without losing a single ship.

It's too bad, because so much else about R-Type Command works just fine. Most ships have a balanced range of attacks, from cannons that only fire in adjacent hexes to various long-range projectiles to support maneuvers in which a ship can pair up with a "force"--a highly durable and effective ramming tool by itself--and access intriguing new abilities. Fighters in particular have a clever incremental charge attack that can literally raze a straight line of two or three nearby enemies, but that gets reset to zero if the fighter takes even non-damaging enemy fire. Someone at Irem should have added a similar counterbalance for bombers with a Balmung bent.

If there's a brighter side to R-Type Command, it's the ad-hoc multiplayer, where another player can mitigate the AI's proclivity to wander into Balmung ambushes. You'll still need a patient friend, since there aren't turn-time limits, and a typically well-executed turn can take a good two or three minutes. The option to wager resources you can use to build better or supplementary ships adds a cool meta-mechanic--the winner gets whatever they secure in the mission plus the initial wager, cleaning up double. But if you're just looking for a solid solo-thinker, you've got a lot of better hand-held options at this point, and the balance issues in R-Type Command make it tough to recommend.

What a great idea for an old-school series, sadly sidelined by an issue that should've been obvious and easy to fix in testing.

-Matt