Review - Monday 1st January 2007 - 12:00am
One of the most ground breaking squad based shooters is making a comeback. Released originally by Sensible Software, a port by Tower Studios and Finesse Mobile (former Kuju Wireless) is placing you in charge of your own squad. Your only mission is to squash a rebellion against the forces of corruption from 'El Presidente'.
Depending on the mission given to you, your squad might consist of only two to four troopers to use. Of course, the end objective of all missions given to you is strikingly clear and can be stated as such - Kill everything that’s not a part of your squad and blow everything that your squad can’t use especially those huts that seem to never run out of enemy soldiers.
Graphically, as I’ve said before, Tower Studios has tried very hard to give us the same feel as that of when it first came out on the Amiga. The level designs are almost lifted straight up from the original Cannon Fodder and they include a mixture of snow, jungle and desert areas that includes your usual winding pathways, rivers that you have to cross and all that helpful foliage that provides you with safety and cover from enemy detection and fire. The grunts that you control don’t look like the hardened killing machines that they should be but instead cutesy little soldiers that seems to contain more than enough gallons of life fluids to leave a bloody mess when they get hit and explode leaving gore all around.
Aurally, the game is very surprising as the developers manage to incorporate sound effects that include all kinds of painful screams whenever someone in the game gets shot and it doesn’t stop there as you can also hear the meaty thunk of bullets screaming out of the barrel and into flesh. Musicallys the game tries for a lighter tone as it tries to go for the whole dark comedy effect for the whole game.
Gamplay wises the game will be a sort of disappointment to gamers who’ve already played the Amiga versions as the gameplay suffered a lot in its transition to the mobile platform. Instead of point and click action with your mouse, the mobile version employs a cursor that you have to rotate to make your soldiers move and shoot in the desired direction. While this provides enough control for simple excursions and scouting of the enemy territory, the complexity of the controls show up as a weakness during enemy encounters. It's just plain hard to swing the cursor around in dealing with multiple enemies and this sometimes result in an unnecessary lost of a fodder’s life. Thankfully the developers seemed to have recognized the limitation in the hardware’s problem and made your fodders’ fire faster and in a wider arc. This way you can truly do a blossom of death spray with your weapons, especially when there are four people in your squad firing and swinging around. This way you don’t have to be accurate on the dot to kill your enemies.
Another gameplay issue that didn’t translate well with the port was that aside from the firepower issue of having four soldiers there wasn’t any other real use of having three other people trail your leading shooter. While yes its true that you can still split your squad into two but aside from having this make the exploration of the map more convenient and easier there is really no tactical advantage to it as the other group that you may choose to leave on its own will have no real intelligence to it. You won’t be able to assign any waypoints or even get them to fire at will when an enemy stumbles onto their position. Aside from this, all the missions differ only in the quantity of enemies and the map type. The Amiga version had other mission types such as rescue ops and even civilians that you had to avoid hitting while doing a raid on your targets which this version sadly lacked in its port to the mobile version. However, this is offset when you reach the later missions as you get to ride tanks and even take control of gun emplacements, alreading adding to mayhem and death that you can create. Also, the missions will start feeling more like strategical ones as you can’t just waltz in and start killing everybody as enemy numbers and their firepower gets an increase at an exponential rate with each level. It starts being strategical as you now have to plan ahead, and see which points in the area you have to surgically strike first before hitting the other points. Also, to overcompensate for the harder mission levels, the developers, start giving you more lives to play with so you can experiment to your hearts’ content on how to finish the mission areas.
As it is, this mobile port of Cannon Fodder is no match for it predecessor but taken on its own without the history of the original Cannon Fodder and the game’s subsequent sequels makes it a fun game. While true it doesn’t have the tactical depth and cleverness of the original, it's still is a romp into a slaughter house where you get to run around and blow everything and anything that moves with an array of grenades, tank shells and the old reliable machine guns. Having said that, this version of the Cannon Fodder shouldn’t be miss out, not just for the nostalgic sense but also for its own weight of being a good game to play.
