I picked up a demo CD for this at CompUSA (R.I.P.) back in they day, played the heck out of it, then got the full game when it was released. Yes the graphics are dated by today's standards but the story is timeless. While the story is great, the best parts are the level designs and the voice acting; both of these really breathe life into the story.

There are several levels where you're going in with incomplete intelligence. This leads to fluid mission objectives & strategies which seem more interesting than knowing everything. This doesn't happen every mission but it does happen often enough to keep things interesting. As you progress in the story, the enemies are evolving also.

Tom Baker does the narration and he's a perfect fit. Each pilot has their own voice and dialog options. They can compliment or criticize each other, report a kill or enemy sighting, give a status report, complain with your vehicle selection for them ("son... I drive tanks..."), and others. I enjoyed the short video about how Ransom died the first time. I was hoping they would do that for each of the pilots but, sadly, that is not the case.

The main negative that stood out for me was the unit pathfinding. Sometimes your helicopter will get stuck on a lightpole and just sit there until you manually intervene. I had a rhino (light tank) on one of the last missions that bumped into a car then got stuck. It's a tank!

Anyways, this was a nostalgia buy for me and I still like it.


P.S. Yes, the play time is low. It only tracks the launcher, not the game. Actually the game worked much better for me running the hostilewaters.exe file directly without the launcher. With the launcher the text part of the mission debrief was horrendously slow.