System requirements: 386SX, 4 MB Ram, DOS 5.0, Mouse, 25 MB hard drive,
512K VGA VESA-compatible.
Sound cards supported: SB, SB Pro, SB 16
Copy Protection: None
Reviewers system: 486 DX2/50, 8 MB Ram, SB 16
Reviewer recommends: 8 MB Ram, 33 Mhz or better CPU.
Harpoon II (H2) is a very detailed wargame simulating modern-day naval combat. You take the place of a theatre commander, in charge of various assets: ships, planes, and subs. The game runs 'clocked', where each second of your time represents as little as one second and as much as thirty minutes of game time - you can change this ratio at your desire, and pause it to give orders. The game is always one-player, you against the computer.
You play a game by choosing one of around a dozen scenarios, or one of seven tutorials. The tutorials are _defintely_ worth playing through, a very well-designed set that does a good job of demonstrating nearly all the functionality of the game.
Once you finish the tutorials, on you go to the scenarios. The demise of the Cold War has made things difficult on lovers of modern-day wargames - 360 does a good job of surmounting this, giving you a plausible series of scenarios which are _not_ all based on US vs. USSR (indeed, only one has this matchup). The majority are third-world flare-ups: a border squabble between Ecuador and Peru, a struggle in the Antarctic between Chile and Argentina, a battle between the US and North Korea, etc. Some on the net have criticized the scenarios for not being big enough (most have around half a dozen to a dozen assets/side), but it seemed fine to me. A more significant criticism is that the scenarios have precisely the same force compositions each time - while the initial deployment locations vary slightly, the order of battle is unchanging. This significantly reduces replay value, as you always know exactly what the enemy will have after the first time through. Oh well.
Once you pick a scenario, and a side to play in the scenario, you are allowed to pick a difficulty level. You can also 'custom-tailor' your difficulty, toggling various components to the setting you desire.
Pick a side to play, and off you go! The first thing you'll see is a 'main battle window' showing the overall tactical situation, and a bunch of other windows showing you the current time, current incoming messages, and so forth. A great feature of H2 is that it contains its own multi-windowing system - rather than continually frantically scrolling from your air base in the top left to your sub in the bottom right to your task force in the middle, you can spawn multiple windows, each with its own magnification level, each covering various parts of the battlefield. Another great feature of this is that you can assign a window to 'track' a particular unit - as the unit moves, the window automatically pans to keep the unit centered. Furthermore, you can decide for each window what sort of things you want displayed within in - you can decide whether or not to see weapon range arcs, land masses, latitude/longitude lines, and a host of other things. You might decide, for example, to have your 'sub-tracking' window (you can name the windows, BTW) show sonar ranges but not radar ranges. Terrific! The windowing system is a Windows clone - the same mechanisms you use to move, resize, iconify, and destroy Windows windows are used here (hope 360 doesn't get sued!). I thought this was a great decision, since you don't have to learn an idiosyncratic windowing system from scratch. On the other hand, it does inherit the weaknesses of Windows along with the strengths - the one that has generated the most criticism on the net is that you kill a window by double-clicking in a tiny corner. Oh well, can't win 'em all!
Back to the map. You'll see your units displayed in one of two (user- chosen) iconic stles. Either 'stylized', where a plane is shown as a little plane, a ship is shown as a little ship, etc., or 'NTDS', a more abstract military scheme where a plane is shown as an upside-down U (because it acts above the ground, I guess), a ship is shown as a circle (it acts both above and below the ground), etc. I liked the NTDS scheme, but I liked even more the fact that you could choose.
As you look at the map, you'll usually see (depending on the preferences you've set for the window) a bunch of circles radiating out from your forces. There are 6 such circles per unit, showing the range of its air, surface, and submarine sensors as well as the range of its air, surface, and submarine weaponry. As you might imagine, the radii of these circles for various units are really the key dynamic driving the battle! While I've generally been throwing out praise for the visual interface of this game, the weapon/sensor circles are a real letdown, as the 6 colors assigned have no rhyme or reason to them whatsoever. The 'surface weaponry' ring is red, but the 'surface sensor' ring is...yellow! The 'air weaponry' ring is pink, but the 'air sensor' ring is ...white! They're probably just mimicing some military standard coding, but you really just have to memorize all 6 colors.
OK, now you've figured out what you're seeing on the map - the little circles are ships, the little U's are subs, etc. But what _type_ of ship? What forces are you dealing with? This 'force analysis' is another area where the game really shines, although it threatens to overwhelm you in detail. Click on one of your assets, say a ship, and you see in the 'unit status' window the name of the ship, it's type (FF, DD, etc.), its course/speed/bearing, and a few other things. If you click on the 'database' button, a window pops up giving you a one-paragraph description of the ship class, along with a little picture of the ship. But don't stop there! By more mouse clicking you can find out exactly what type of sensors the ship is carrying, and by even more clicking you can find out exactly what types of weapons its got, and the exact behavior of each: min/max range, speed, target type, damage inflicted, etc. This 'database' feature works for all subs, ships, and aircraft - you'll use it extensively at the start of a scenario (perhaps _too_ extensively - I wish there was some way to get a quicker summary), but rarely use it during battle.
Aircraft have another layer of detail generally missing in ships and subs. Aircraft, even aircraft of a particular type, can have various types of armaments stuck on them. Rather than load each weapon on a plane one by one, each plane type has a series of 'bundles', called 'loadouts', of packages of armaments. For example, one loadout might be better for long- range ground strikes, while another might be best for air-to-air combat. You can control which loadouts you put on which planes. Very nice, except that the loadout names are military-style gibberish (e.g. "PGM-07-#21B") which take a little getting used to.
After a lot of database surfing you know what forces you have and what each is good for. Now lets actually play the game!
You start the game by 'resuming' the clock - the game can crawl along as slowly as one second of your time to one second of game time (useful during intense combat), or as slowly as one second of your time to 30 minutes of game time. When a 'staff message' comes up, alerting you of some event (an enemy contact, say), the clock temporarily reverts to 1:1 - a very nice feature!
There are no less than four ways you can control your units - individually, as a 'group', as part of a mission, or as part of a formation.
The individual control is the simplest. Pick a unit, click on the 'navigate' icon, lay out a path for it, and off it goes. Similar controls let you change the units speed and altitude, change its sensor emissions, attack enemy units, etc.
You can take a bunch of units and 'group' them, into a naval task force for example. All the controls which worked for the individual units can now be applied to the group as a whole - smoothly done!
A more complicated but powerful way to control units is to create a mission. There's around ten types of missions (naval strike, anti-sub patrol, air reconaissance, etc.). When you create a mission, you can then assign various units of yours, be they air, surface, or sub, to that mission, and off they go! A particularly nice aspect of this is that air units assigned to a patrol will automatically return to base when low on fuel, and will automatically return to patrol after refueling.
Finally, you can take a group of naval units and edit their 'formation' - which ships are near the edge of the formation, which are focusing on anti- sub pickets, which are focusing on anti-air CAP, etc. Unfortunately, the generally excellent manual lets you down here, as this complicated and important part of the game is not described in enough detail. Making things worse is that there isn't a tutorial covering this.
Once you've given your units orders, they'll go their merry way, and it probably won't be too long before you're fighting some enemy units. Two nice features of the game help keep you from getting too overwhelmed in detail here. Firstly, you can set 'weapons free', which allows units to use their own initiative when firing weapons - you don't have to scurry from plane firing each weapon yourself. Secondly, you can also toggle a 'weapons allocation' option, under which you still fire the weapons, but the computer tells you which weapons it recommends that you fire.
Without getting into too much detail on the ins and outs of naval warfare, suffice to say that IMHO the driving dynamic of modern warfare is that nearly every unit can _kill_ an enemy long before they can _see_ an enemy, and vice versa. In essence, every unit is like an artillery unit. This inversion make recon units the 'king of the battlefield', even more than aircraft carriers, in my opinion. You'll find the lowly helicopter and the sitting-duck AWACS plane to be tremendously valuable assets, as they let your strike units detect the enemy without being detected themselves.
There are many more features in the game - mid-air refueling, logistics, steerable missiles, active/passive/intermittent sensors, and on and on, but I think what I've described is enough to give you an overall feel for the game.
You get three types of feedback as the game progresses. First, little message windows pop up informing of certain key events - an enemy contact, a sinking ship, etc. Second, these messages are augmented by little voice clips ("Alpha Bravo, this is Alpha XRay - contact lost"). I found these little clips very enjoyable - they're short, informative, and realistic. Third, some events (firing a missle, hitting an enemy) are accompanied by little video clips. Nice, but no big deal.
Surprisingly, the voice clips are nearly the _only_ use of sound in the game - you could turn off sound and not really lose much.
Its difficult for me to judge the AI, both because I haven't played the game that much and because I'm frankly not that good at the game! My overall impression is that the computer does a very creditable job as a unit commander, firing weapons, but is weak on overall strategy.
The game has huge amounts of detail, well-presented, but it just didn't seem that _fun_ to me. I hate making such an amorphous criticism, but I can't really pin it down further. I can only tell you that H2 just didn't "pull me in" like other games have. I'd sit down in front of my computer, steeling myself for an evening of H2, and wind up playing Minesweeper. However, if you're a hard-core wargamer, interested in modern-day naval combat, you'll probably love this game. In conclusion, I can do no better than paraphrase G.B. Shaw - this is the kind of game you'll like, if you like this sort of game.
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Ken Fishkin for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.