Cannon Fodder

Incoming!

A Review of Cannon Fodder

It all started off so easily. The manual was reassuringly small, the characters on the packaging looked innocent and cute, the controls were easy and there seemed to be an endless supply of men. The game, at first, was deceptively easy. I breezed through the first few missions. I stopped saving after every mission like I normally would. And then, around mission 4, it all went horribly wrong. My seemingly endless supply of men were dying; they'd be spitted on spears that shot out of the ground without warning, blown into small fragments by land mines, grenades and rockets and shot into Swiss cheese by machine gun fire. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. After all, I'd thought the same things the first time I'd played Tempest and Pacman and, more recently, X-Com. It's this sort of game, that after losing half of my men, I shift my body more comfortably in my chair, turn my baseball cap around backwards and move my face inches from the screen, while muttering, "Ok. Now we get serious."

Cannon Fodder is a relatively new game by Sensible Software, a British software company. It is essentially a fast-paced arcade game, with small bits of strategy thrown in for good measure. You are the leader of a small group of short, heavily armed soldiers sent in to kill apparently endless supplies of the enemy, demolish their homes and generally destroy everything in sight using a combination of bullets, hand grenades and rockets. The missions are generally composed of three or four phases and the game can only be saved upon completion of the mission.

As a basic description of game play, the game itself looks similar to one of those soccer games with really small players except the ball is replaced by machine gun fire. You maneuver three or so of these tiny soldiers rapidly around a smoothly scrolling screen killing anything that moves and picking up bonus weapons and, occasionally in later levels, driving tanks and jeeps. The difficulty is due to the fact that the computer usually has an endless supply of enemies to throw at you and stopping them all gets more difficult as the game progresses. They become smarter, fire more frequently, move more rapidly and there are more and more of them coming at once.

While the game has enjoyed a permanent home on my hard drive, I do have a few problems with it and reservations about recommending it to others. For a start, installation did not go smoothly and the first few times I started the game it locked up. The problem was with my memory configuration and a few of the drivers I was loading and was easily fixed by making a boot disk. My computer configuration is reasonably standard and I've only rarely had problems before this, so I hesitate to recommend this to the complete computer illiterate. It also uses the common, but still frustrating, method of type-the-first-word-on-page-5 copy protection. While, I agree with the basic premise of copy protection, I have problems finding my wallet some days, let alone a manual for a game I play once a week or so and thus find this particular form of copy protection to be one of the most annoying.

Which leads into my final difficulty of the game, replay value. While I play it fairly often, I'm not certain most other people would. It's one of those games that requires the sort of coordination I lost when I hit puberty. Where I find it a challenge, I imagine the vast majority of people would consider it frustrating and lose interest quickly once they hit the harder missions. The method used to save the games (eg. waiting until all of the phases are complete), makes it particularly frustrating at times. On the whole, I would recommend Cannon Fodder to anyone who enjoys arcade games. The music, the graphics and the strange sense of humor within the game make it fun to play and the experience of blowing cute little soldiers into bits makes it the ideal relaxation game. For the rest of us who like to play arcade games occasionally at the end of the day, I'm more hesitant. If you find it in the bargain bin in the next few months, however, definitely pick it up.