Carrier command
Carrier command is a strategic game in which you control an aircraft carrier and all of its resources and your aim is to take over as many islands as possible. You carry four flying vehicles called mantas which you can use to attack any enemies on the islands. After you have cleared the area of unfriendly units or if the island is a neutral one you can take over the island by sending in one of your amphibious tanks called walrusses. These are used to set up equipment on the island with which you can control what kind of recourses it produces and help you in your effort. However at the same time an enemy carrier is doing exactly the same thing on the opposite end of the island chain and it is a matter of time before you encounter each other.
The aim is to destroy the enemy carrier but this is not as easy as it sounds because like you it is completely self sufficient. You do need resources from the islands to produce any lost vehicles and supplies. The main screen shows all the different options on the sides of the screen while in the middle you can see stats and the view from the vehicles. There are tons of options presented to you and you have to keep track of a zillion things. You can view damage reports for the carrier, fire the main carriers main lasers in an attack, equip your vehicles with weapons and other equipment and even control all the vehicles yourself as well. You can directly control any of the vehicles including the carrier but you can also opt to use the automatic pilot. For those who’d like to go straight into action there is an option to start an action game which basically means that the islands are devided in half and you start right next to an enemy island. The strategic game starts with you on one end and only one island under your control whereas the enemy already controls eight islands.
Carrier command is a strategy game that starts off slow at the beginning but this gives you an opportunity to build up your forces before tackling the enemy carrier. The graphics are quite crude with simple 3D graphics and the slower systems have almost a monochrome look to them. I don’t think this really distracts from the game though because the strategy part of the game is excellent and once you encounter the enemy it’s a race to conquer his islands before he conquers yours and finally taking out the carrier itself. The amount of options needs some getting used to but if you can look past that and the visuals then this is an excellent strategy game .
Overal rating: 8.5/10
This game was released for serveral different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. The DOS, Atari St and this version are identical. |
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed with winAPE v2.0 A6. Because of the hardware limitations you can only control three vehicles instead of four and the main graphics are only in one color and less detailed. The map also contains less islands in total. |
| Atari ST | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed with SainT v1.10. |
| C64 | Released in 1988. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. There are no 3D graphics at all and are replaced with flat sprites. The strategic game still remains basically the same but a bit of a letdown considering the other systems are true to the original. |
| DOS | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS en win2k PC. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1989. Game has been tested but not completed with emuZwin v2.5. This version is almost identical to the Amstrad version. |
| Date added | Dec-20-2004 19:57 |
| Name | Carrier command |
| Developer | Realtime games |
| Publisher | Rainbird |
| First released | 1988 |
| Genre | Strategy |
