Topic: KKND 2 Krossfire - A Review

[Mooning Freddy]

Those of you who know my preference in gaming know that I'm a huge Command & Conquer fan. Ever since the days of Dune 2000 until Weswood's demise know I've been addicted to that futuristic strategy gaming.
What was awesome about Red Alert, Tiberian Sun and the rest of Westwood's series was that they were both original and simple kind of strategy, it took a little time to figure the game out and it was fun as hell.

With the major success of Weswood's games, it was only natural for clones to appear. That is how the Australian company Melbourne House came up with KKND- Krush, Kill 'n Destroy. The story was simple- similarly to the plot in Fallout, the world was destroyed in some sort of nuclear holocaust. The lucky ones managed to survive by hiding in underground vaults. A couple of years later, the radiation level went down a little and the vault-dwellers, called Survivors, decided to return to the surface.
Unfortunately, it turned out not all the rest of humanity was wiped out and the surface now belonged to heavily mutated clansmen, known as The Evolved. So the Survivors did the only thing they could do- set out to destroy The Evolved.

Apparently the war wasn't going very well for them because they eventually decided to retreat back into the vaults. After a couple of more decades they returned for a second round against The Evolved. But the two were not alone- some robots, forgotten by men, awakened to find out humans fu**ed-up the planet and are very angry. So the robots, Series 9, obviously set out to do the only thing that makes sense- kill all humans, Survivors and Evolved alike. This is the beginning of KKND2: Krossfire.

 

The good points about it? It's a damn fun(ny) game. It's got cool units, funny mission descriptions and really nice level design. It's a bit like Red Alert 2, but without the cold war jokes.  The levels are not easy and some take careful tactical planning. I mean, What game throws missile-firing mammoths and bomb-dropping giant bees at you? The music is not bad. It's no Frank Klepaci, but it's nice.

The bad? The gameplay is a bit unbalanced. The game has cool tactics and options but you need to figure everything out on your own. It's not really a disadvantage but  building a structure without knowing what it does is a bit annoying at first.
The worst part about the gameplay is that the game gives the defender a really unfair advantage. It takes quite a while to gather enough resources to build a decent base but the base defenses (turrets) are so damn strong that launching a successful offensive becomes a real challenge. It doesn't help at all that every structure can be quickly fixed using cheap engineers, which means having enough turrets and engineers makes a base nearly impenetrable. Also, the lack of an actual story makes the game lose points, but hey, it IS called Krush, Kill 'n Destroy. I never expected a plot like in Tiberian Sun.

Bottom line? If you're an oldschool RTS freak like me, you should play this game. It's too damn fun not to.

[Lelygax]

This game have a multiplayer mode?

[Mooning Freddy]

I believe it does, but being a game from 1998, don't know how many players it has online.