Summer 2022 update:

While CC2 is down to $30 from $50 and has greater mod support features than before, it remains a very unintuitive and arguably pricey game for what it offers - and the stability issues, restrictions, and general limitations of modding currently stunt further growth of the workshop. There are few modders, few mods, and very scant documentation on top of a very unstable foundation and seems very difficult to expand upon. In the last four months I believe only two people other than myself have successfully performed modelswaps, and even then it took them two to three months to figure out how to get the game to start loading textures for their custom models.

Trying to work with the SDK provided has proven incredibly obtuse and painful in that field alone, and even doing basic xml and lua script edits to, say, move a light or hide a mesh seem to invoke the wrath of CC2, making the game extremely prone to crash for reasons that remain painfully unclear.

The game may be cheaper, the game may have 'mod support', but the last few months of updates have done relatively ltitle to grow CC2 or establish a sufficient base from which the community can work. Don't expect mods to magically solve the shortcomings of CC2.


Drone strikes, recon flights, and logistics chains - Carrier Command 2 in a steeply-priced and unintuitive nutshell.

Powering through the low-poly seas at night, plotting recon flights, marking targets, and sending out a hundred and sixty millimeters of fire support is something that CC2 does rather well. While large in scale, with a sixty-four island campaign to run through in first person, it's very narrow in scope - it's not a game with sweeping cinematic camera pans.

You will not be watching your formations of strikecraft blow stuff up from the comfort of a bird's-eye view - not unless you're seated at the control console and staring out the camera of an observer craft. This game is not, contrary to what you may gleam from the trailers, anything like C&C or SupCom. You will almost never have more than eight aircraft at once.

CC2 is about being on the bridge of the one, single carrier that can turn the tide, and the scant few tanks and planes it can launch to do so. It's about taking one frame, bolting a new weapon to it, and figuring out how to make it work because you either make do with what you have or you give up. It's about manning the scopes, spotting targets, marking for fire support - guiding cruise missiles over a dozen kilometers to a fiery home in the middle of a pack of seals, but only when you've made sure they have no CIWS to stop you with.

It's about seeing lights in the distance that mean the enemy is near, and picking your fights carefully - or at least, trying to torpedo them, then desperately trying to figure out how to not hit yourself with your own explosive water tube.

It's $50 native, $40 on the winter sale - and if you think that's steep for 'take island, sink boat', then I'd agree.

CC2 is not the most upfront of games when it comes to mechanics and tactics, but then I suppose that MicroProse has historically released many games in that vein. It's a doubled-sided blade, where on one hand it's not agonizingly hands-on and guiding you through everything in an unskippable fashion, but on the other - there's much that you have to pick up on your own. An open-ended problem can only be solved with what you know - or make up, anyway.

Having to get a feel for all the weapons and vehicles through unlocking, manufacturing, and shipping them in puts a lot behind even just experimenting with certain units and loadouts. Figuring out how to use the Petrel as a transport is something that I simply don't believe is explained in the manual at all, for example, and it can take a while to nab.

As a result, not only is the Petrel an uncommon later-game unit, but the unique purpose of it - transportation - is simply not taught to the player. To get it to airlift, you need to set a waypoint at an altitude of a hundred meters, and then drag to a valid ground unit - but I doubt most people would think to scroll through different altitudes. It's both rare and roundabout to learn, and that makes it less of something you'd just find out by playing, and more something you have to actively look up - which I don't consider intuitive or convenient.

Conveniently learning how to use things, however, is not the biggest problem of CC2, not the biggest reason that the price it demands is a rather high one. It's a matter of content and variety.

There are three ground units, four fliers that you can run from your carrier. There are also at least two types of non-carrier naval units in the game, and turrets that guard bases. These, however, are not units you can control or produce as far as I know - and the bases are not things you can reinforce or really operate from outside of adding to your stock of weapons, equipment, frames, and munitions. In practice, these islands are largely the same - they're either a storage space for items, or they make items that then go into those stores.

For $50, 40 on the Winter Sale, you get seven units and your carrier - and to start with, you only have blueprints for half of them, nevermind plans for things like your ammunition or weapons. Without the ability to tune that without having to drop in mods or manual save editing, I think it worsens the sense of content and variety behind CC2 because you'll always start out with very little in the same ways. More starting loadouts, different starting sets of blueprints and equipment stores would maybe help change things up a little.

While I have gotten a lot out of Carrier Command in the past couple days and intend to get more out of it, the price makes it a hard sell to my friends beyond gift-giving and seems to ward many people off. It's very much a MicroProse type of game, from what I can tell - and I'd say it's a very faithful successor to the original game, from what I've seen. It's very granular, contemporary, and stylistic, and the way the sea looks I quite like - traveling between islands has felt more interesting than what I've seen of the Amiga version, which granted is a low bar, and Bohemia Interactive's CC Gaea Mission.

You'd think a company known for MilSim games would have done a better job at Carrier Command than Gaea. I could go into a comparative rant just from what I've seen of the first few minutes, but long into short - given the choice between stylized low-poly drone strikes and incredibly generic looking sci-fi shooters, I'd trend towards the former.

I'd say that if the price wards you off, there's on harm in seeing some youtube coverage and learning more about it. You don't have to play a game to find it interesting, after all.

Do look out for a good sale, though.