Cannon Fodder

The Good
The Gameplay was fantastic. It's a creative, unique, top-down veiw where your little soldier buddies follow you around the terrain while you do your little missions. Most of the time you have to kill all the enemies, destroy a building, ect. It's a smooth control using the keyboard and the keys aren't hard to learn at all. It's a great game for it's time and it's a very underrated.

The Bad
The Gameplay is about the only good part of the game. The graphics are very weak. The Terrain graphics are ok, but the blood graphics look more like red jumbo sized lego blocks spurtin' around. The soldiers you control are "pixelish" in look (not at heart) and when they move, it looks like they grow new legs as they move along. So the graphics are a big suck factor.

The Bottom Line
If you don't mind shabby graphics, and you enjoy a good overhead-view action game, then this is a game you should check out today. Or, tommorrow. Or sometime soon. But, if the graphics suckfactor is a problem for you, then you should go be picky somewhere else (In other words, this game is not for you)

The Good
Colorful graphics, humorous style, lots of nice, tiny, cute animation and sound. Tons of character, lotsa weapons and gadgets and puzzle-like level design.

Maps are great, Jungle and VCs, Arctic and Desert etc. They start a bit small and expand to vast areas of beautiful surroundings. Mouse plays well, saves are OK.

Great soundtrack, solid design.

The Bad
It was a bit too tough at times. Unforgiving even.

Still... it was balanced out by the relatively small duration of the game.

The Bottom Line
Amazingly enough, no review for this great classic was written. That was reason enough for me to register- this is actually my first review here.... i just HAD to throw in my 2 cents....

This is indeed a solid game. Objectives and gameplay structure is simple: you are in control of a small band of soldiers which are controled either as a whole, or individually. Left click moves, right shoots with rifles, both activate special weapon (grenade / bazooka). Simply enough, the soldiers have plain objectives: destroy all buildings or more commonly go to place A from B, or kill all soldiers in the map. Simple and fast action. The correct resources must be used in the right place & time. Graphics are somehow small but detailed and kinda...er...cute! As in Sensible Soccer or SensibleGolf, lots of clever animation and sprites that win you over, make up for the low-res graphs.

The Good
The Genesis/Mega Drive version of Cannon Fodder was an oddity. A game that was designed for control with a mouse that works with a joypad.

Released in 1994, it had a lot to live up to. The Amiga & PC releases had gone down very well, but the skeptics said it couldn't be done on the consoles. They were wrong. Although it was missing the legendary theme song 'War has never been so much fun' it was still a blast. The digitised version of the song was good enough anyway.

The game is a 2/3 top down shooter where you control a squadron of Grunts to shoot & blast your way through each mission, split into several phases. each with different objectives and parameters. It was a game that required good vision, quick reflexes and a quicker brain.

With the enemy innumerable, the terrain hostile & the natives in the line of fire it made for a game that was testing to say the least. Thankfully though there is a password system, without which the game would be nigh on impossible.

The graphics were typical fare from Renegade & the Sensible team. Miniature sprites that hold great detail. The terrain between on each level looking great too.

The game itself, although of a violent nature, had elements of dark humour which is all part of the fun. You can't help but be amused & bemused at some of the things on show.

The sound was superb & greatly complimented to the gameplay. Although there is no in level music there are subtle sound effects which really add to the tension. But the gunfire sound effects can soon shatter that.

A superb game that was a little on the tough side but excellent to play.

The Bad
The difficulty curve was a tad steep.

The Bottom Line
This is what war games should be like, a blast that doesn't let up.