Score: 8
"An excellent game with solid gameplay to offer"
date: March 17, 2008
It is refreshing to see a flash game that employs tried and tested elements without being entirely cliched... OK, it is still cliched. In "The Commander's Sister", you are a newly-arrived captain at a US military base and the last line of defense against an endless onslaught of enemy vehicles, and your job is to position your arsenal of defense towers in the right places and blast the intruders away without incurring too much financial and human costs to your own side. Despite its having some disturbing resemblance to the once-popular real-time strategy game Command and Conquer, it is an excellent game with solid gameplay to offer, although I must say that there are several things that should have done right in the first place.
- Plot
To movie buffs like myself, a plot such as this in TCS is just unacceptable. It is farcical and completely unbelievable, and whoever thinks the given premise has even the slightest possibility to occur in real life should be shot dead at the instance - and it's not just Hilary Clinton I am talking about here.
- Actors
A thirty-something commander? Sounds alright. A gorgeous-looking fighter pilot who is also a captain? Plausible. A twenty-ish White House intern? I'd buy that. An acne-ridden general? Whoops...
- Coding
If you play in "Normal" mode, save game, shut down the whole thing, open it again and load game, you will still get the "Normal" difficulty throughout the remainder of the missions, but the end-game screen will tell you that you have been playing in "Easy" mode all along. Go figure.
- Target audiences
Forget it - the Internet is a conglomeration of ridiculously stupid people who have somehow figured out how to use a keyboard without ending up jamming it in their nostrils. As one comedy website points out, the Newgrounds community is largely "brain-dead". In other words, never, ever make a game and post it here with the view of having the players to come up with their own strategies in order to beat it. If your game somehow involves the use of numbers, it should be in the context of a generic fantasy world where "elements" mean fire, water, earth and air and every character has a meticulously long list of attributes. Or, if you have decided to make big guns a feature, they should only be used against terrorists, zombies, Mexicans and foreigners in general. While the shooting of Chinese military vehicles with cannons and missiles is quite acceptable here, the use of credits as means of purchasing non-fantasy weapons is simply morally incorrect by the Newgrounds standards. Be sure not to repeat such a mistake in your sequel, and make the commander's sister an elf next time.
