Battlezone 98 Redux

My perspective on Battlezone 98 is hopelessly biased. I've been playing it since 1998, which means I've spent nearly three decades coming back to the same game. At this point, it feels less like a title I've played and more like a place I've visited repeatedly throughout my life. Even so, I think Battlezone remains one of the most interesting strategy games ever made. Its central idea was remarkably bold: combine a first-person combat game with a real-time strategy game, then force the player to operate both layers simultaneously. You're not sitting above the battlefield issuing orders from a god's-eye view. You're down in the mud, driving a tank, fighting for your life, gathering resources, constructing bases, and directing an entire war effort from the cockpit. What makes Battlezone special is the constant tension between the tactical and strategic levels of play. At any given moment, you're fighting the enemy directly in front of you while also deciding where your scavengers should harvest, what your factories should build next, where your defenses should be established, and how your forces should be deployed. Few games have managed to blend those responsibilities so naturally. By modern standards, the game unquestionably shows its age. Some of the interface conventions are relics of the late 1990s, and there are rough edges that newer players will notice immediately. Yet the underlying design remains remarkably fresh. There is still nothing quite like commanding an army while personally participating in the battle from the driver's seat. Most importantly, Battlezone has that rare quality that keeps pulling me back year after year: replayability. The campaigns remain enjoyable, skirmishes can unfold in countless ways, and the core gameplay loop is as compelling today as it was when I first installed the game. Few titles from 1998 still earn a place on my hard drive. Battlezone isn't just one of them; it's one of the reasons I still believe experimentation in game design matters.

I had owned the game, but now I don't. I don't remember why or how. It might have been because I was not good enough to beat the first level, which I don't recall being a problem in the pre-steam days. I am recommending entirely based on the fun I had with the original, and in the hopes that my failures are my own.

Such a good game and a classic. I've played this so much as a kid and now I can as an adult too. It is harder than I remember - and the game is difficult too.

One of the greatest games of all time, in a genre that gamers love but that developers continue to pretend doesn't exist, which includes basically this, to some extent Dragons Dogma, and Mount and Blade. The mixture of FPS and RTS components with a strategy map and story, whether emergent or predefined, is gaming gold. But I guess it takes actual imagination and talent to make games like that, so we should just be grateful we've ever seen anything like them at all.

Its a First Person shooter + Tower Defense + Chess. You build your base up and protect your key pieces then build offensive pieces to attack another base. You can snipe out drivers from opponents tanks or pieces then commandeer them.

Quite honestly the original 1998 version of the game was the only game I played as a teenager growing up. I got it for Christmas right after its release and it was the best game I had ever seen graphically speaking at the time and now it is actually way better with the REDUX version. It became a family game between my dad brothers and myself with reverse wired cables between the 2 house computers so we could play without using the old dial-up and tying up the landline. Spent literally thousands of hours playing and have never found another first person strategy that compares to the Battlezone 1&2 franchise. It was and still is quite literally a one of a kind game series that should have been a lot more popular.

Love this game from 28 years ago! Its like civilization build while driving a hover tank on planets. PS the asteroid belt used to be a planet. and the cold war on earth had armies in space after alien technology True or False or Diversions. Believe what you like, but play it and save often. Runs on slow machines, though this is a remake.... oh and there are map editor creators...

this game is not playable, the horizontal rotation controls dont work, either on the keyboard or on the mouse you will just get endlessly destroyed while trying desperately to rotate your vehicle

The play is the best thing about this old game. Infinate amount of scrap to use and pretty good first person shooter for its time.

‎Pretty cool and fun mixture of FPS and RTS.