I wasn’t even born when the first Carrier Command came out. But damn, the trailer footage for the sequel made it look like fun, so I was looking forward to giving it a go. Finally, Steam Next Fest came around. So here’s a brief look at the Carrier Command 2 demo.
Carrier Command 2 puts you on the bridge of some weird super carrier and sends you out to conquer islands. But unlike Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising, CC2 trades the Warren Ellis plot for the tactile experience of running around the bridge, flipping switches and setting screen modes. I haven’t felt this much fun “physically” interacting with a cockpit since I played Nauticrawl.While the carrier doesn’t have Antaeus’ magical nano forge, it can still swap out modules on the drone units you’ll send out to fight for you. The vehicles look sufficiently droney, and the logistical chain is optimized by having ground vehicles also be amphibious.A shot from a gimbal camera put on a Reaper drone-like platform. The drones have limited slots for modules as well as weight constrains, but as long as you meet them, go wild. Unfortunately, you can’t plug in chips with recorded personalities of early 2000s cool guy pilots.The tactical command of you units is carried out by running to the appropriate screen and clicking about until they start doing what you want. The there are plenty non-command map screens as well, and you better believe they have filters for stuff like humidity.Of course, every screen has a lot of uses, filters, and so forth. I had to findd this one to learn that one of my drones got blown up. Unfortunately, Carrier Command 2 is somewhat unwilling to tell you what destroyed your forces. I still don’t know what happened to the first virus drone that was supposed to capture the island, and it took me some fiddling around to figure out that I need to assemble and send in a new.But what for did those drones lay down their unlives for? To capture islands, which is how you advance in the life of Carried Command 2. Unfortunately, the island command centers are impervious even to ship caliber ammunition (as seen in the screenshot) – you need a drone with mounted virus bots to hack it. I already mentioned that my first met a mysterious end. The second survived to return sans the virus bot cargo. Oh, yeah, ammo reserves are also tracked in the game!The islands are the key to logistics in Carrier Command 2, as they manufacture ammo and equipment that has to then be transported to the carrier. Wonder how it will it all go in the full version!
