Modern Conflict Review: A Mixed Bag

App Name:	Modern Conflict & Modern Conflict HD
Platforms:	iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad
Publisher(s):	Clickgamer
Version Reviewed:	1.0 (iPhone), 1.0 (iPad)
Genre(s):	RTS, resource management
Release Date:	July 9, 2010
Price:	99 cents (iPhone), $2.99 (iPad)

Click Gamer has been batting a thousand with me lately, drawing me into both the deliciously silly Angry Birds and the blazing Helsing’s Fire. So I was looking forward to getting my hands on their latest releases, Modern Conflict and Modern Conflict HD. Unfortunately, these RTS style war-games failed to wow me the way those other games did.

In Modern Conflict, you command fleets of tanks and helicopters in battle over bases scattered across the battlefield. Bases produce additional troops, which you use to assault more bases. Meanwhile, an enemy army is also trying to conquer bases. The goal is to conquer all the bases, defeating the enemy and controlling the battlefield. Combat is waged via a tap system: tap a base to select half the bases’ troops or tap twice to select all of them, and then tap the base you want to attack. If you roll on the enemy with more units than he has fortifying the base, you win the base (and lose troops to the battle). Tank units are limited to assaulting the nearest bases along roads; helicopter units can assault any base they want.

While the game feels at first like an RTS akin to Command & Conquer, it really boils down to a fairly rapid, slightly hectic, think-on-your-toes resource management game. Combat and assault is a continuous process; the computer AI never pauses, and so you can’t, either, or you risk being overwhelmed. You need to quickly find the best holding points in a given area, shoring up those bases and supporting them with units generated elsewhere. There’s a certain elegance to the game design in its simplicity, and it has the potential to be a really fun combat game.

So, yes, Modern Conflict can be fun. But the potential here is tarnished by technical and programming issues.

For one thing, I really dislike the AI. It is far too aggressive even in easy mode and, more disappointing, it seems to be programmed in a way that gives it every advantage over you. For one, it always starts with more resources than you, and it seems to generate units faster than you do; it also recovers more quickly than you do after taking a base, and can coordinate assaults from five bases at once while you’re frantically trying to launch from one at a time. In other words, it isn’t playing like a matched opponent, but like a computer that doesn’t suffer the limitations you do.

Sure, the AI is supposed to make winning difficult; but I absolutely hate games like this, where the AI player lacks the limitations imposed on the players. Call it a cheating AI, a rubber-band AI — it all boils down to an obvious advantage that a player simply cannot emulate. And that always leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

The game tries to moderate the beardy AI with all sorts of random and last-minute “saves” when you are about to lose for the first time, like an air raid blast that reduces enemy numbers or a hefty reinforcement of units. Which is nice, but why does it have to be random and last-minute? These would be much more welcome as power-ups that you might find as you conquer bases, to be deployed when you feel they are strategically useful.

The issue with the AI is complicated by dodgy touch controls. Tapping bases is too precise, such that a single unsensed or off-tap can cancel a raid or halve the number of units you send into battle. In a game where you’re moving and thinking fast, where the numbers are shifting every second, and where attacking at the right moment can be vital, losing out to technical quirks just plain sucks. And, of course, the AI doesn’t have to deal wih this – it fires off the right amount of force every time, faster than you can tap.

In the end, Modern Conflict just wasn’t an enjoyable experience. The AI is too ruthless, the touch controls too dodgy, and the strategy based a little too much around luck and random, last minute saves for it to work as well as the core gameplay should. This may not bother some players, but for me they were enough to spoil the fun.

Now, there are two versions of Modern Conflict available, but I don’t need to review them separately, because Modern Conflict and Modern Conflict HD are the same game. Same missions, same options, same maps — only a greater graphical level of detail separates them. The graphics aren’t even really different, just scaled to better fill the iPad’s size and resolution. Which begs the question: why isn’t this a single Universal app? The HD version certainly feels like a universal app. I hate having to pay for the same game twice.[See comparison, below.]

Two versions of the same level. Top: iPhone. Bottom: iPad.

If RTS and resource management war-games are your taste, then either game, by itself, might be an amusing distraction to you. I wouldn’t invest in both.

Our Score: 2.5/5.

Modern Conflict was available for 99 cents at the time of this review.

Modern Conflict HD was available for $2.99 at the time of this review.

About the Author

Writer@Large Brian P. Hudson is an educator and freelance writer currently living in Dearborn, MI.

 

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