Carrier Command: Gaea Mission Demo

War is fought on all fronts and there is nowhere one can hide now, thanks to submarines, flying drones, tanks, or various other kinds of weapons available out there. Naturally, this might be the case in the future as well, maybe even when humans start colonizing other planets in order to assure the survival of the species.

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is a real-time strategy game in which you get to hold dominion over your very own carrier, which allows you to produce troops, launch attacks, and even establish a resource route. Hence, a giant ship can be enough to wage war on another faction, provided it is well-equipped and it can handle an attack without sinking from the very first blow.

The game talks about an ongoing war between two sides back on Earth: the United Earth Coalition and the Asian Pacific Alliance. However, after many years of back and forth attacks, the planet has become uninhabitable for humans, mainly due to the large amounts of radiation released into the atmosphere. As it happens, a distant moon is the only suitable place to start over, but the two factions go to war over that as well.

The gameplay mechanics are not very different from what you may have seen in every other real-time strategy game, because the steps are almost the same and the game does not feature enough variety to make the combat exciting. Hence, after you manage to make enough troops, you can watch them fight the enemy and even control them if you feel like it, although the terrible pathfinding and AI problems make this part very unpleasant indeed.

The other interesting part is represented by the ability to add new upgrades to your carrier, in order to make it more powerful and increase its effectiveness on the battlefield. Even so, the gimmick gets old rather quickly and you must go back to the actual war, which becomes tedious at an alarming pace. Thankfully, the graphics engine is very good-looking, so you at least have something to look at while you get annoyed.

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission could have been a much better game if the developers applied themselves a bit more. The potential seems to be hidden underneath the lazy design, which is why it’s quite the shame that you won’t get to truly enjoy a nice futuristic war on another planet.