This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Chuck Landry.

Chances are that you’ve never heard of Laser Squad Nemesis. It appeared without much of a fuss, although the team behind it also created the acclaimed X-Com games back in the day. In the same style as X-Com, LSN is a tactical strategy game pitting Space Marines, robots, and aliens at war with one another. The basic premise of the game: wipe out the bad guys. Pretty straight forward.

I’ve taken a good look at some of the press this title has been given. It garners some pretty decent scores ranging mostly in the high 70’s to mid-80’s. Unfortunately, I cannot justify anything but wholeheartedly disagreeing with the rest of the world on this one.

There are three good things about Laser Squad Nemesis. First of all, it will run on just about any machine. No need to run out and grab that latest $400 video card. Your Monster 3D FX will do just fine here.

The game’s second strong point will also save you some cash: it’s a mere $20 at any local shop. You can use the extra money to purchase another game, perhaps?

And finally, the game installs in under a minute. That’s pretty cool.

Of course, that’s because the entire game is only about 14 MB once installed. Heck, the CD it comes on holds barely 40 MB of data, and that’s including DirectX setup. I hate to sound superficial, but that’s a bad sign in this day and age. A big budget title, this is not. Playing this game, I had a hard time believing I was using a state-of-the-art computing machine, not a Windows 95, 486-based system.

The game is tiny because there is very little to it. Sound effects? Yeah, you’ll hear a few decent ones when someone fires a laser or something explodes. But don’t expect music or voices. Any. Not even crappy background ambient music. Not during the game, not during the menus. Zilch. The story is woven together with boxes of text before each mission. You will be reading it yourself if you find yourself that interested. Meanwhile, the game will be silent. Then you start the level, and again – silence. As you’re setting up your moves…more non-noise. Then, as your troops move around the level, you won’t hear any footsteps, but if you’re lucky you just might fire at an enemy once or twice and hear the sputter of laser gunfire.

The gameplay itself is about as monotonous as it comes. I’ve seen some unbelievable quotes floating around out there, touting “fast-paced player tactics.” There are only two explanations for this. Either I’ve been playing a different game or everyone else’s copy came with some choice intoxicants. Everything about LSN screams 1995. A decade ago, this might’ve been an acceptable game. But nothing is fast-paced about it. It is, at its heart, a turn-based strategy game. Rather than really taking turns, however, you issue all of your orders to your troops (one at a time) between turns, and then you press “play” to watch everything unfold real-time. Your entire army starts moving, but so does your opponent’s. So in that sense, you aren’t really taking “turns” with your opponent. It’s more like a real-time strategy game with tons of pauses.

Telling your units to get from point A to point B is simple enough, in theory. You simply click the unit, and right click where you want it to go. However, even though this game is entirely two dimensional, it somehow manages to have camera problems. Something as simple as selecting a unit who is just millimeters off of the edge of your screen is an exercise in patience. The mousewheel conveniently zooms in and out for you, but it does so with a focal point based on where your mouse is. You’d think moving the mouse to the edge where that unit is and then zooming out would work, but nope. Instead, it zooms out far, leaving that same unit just out of view still. So then you zoom back in, feeling confident that since the mouse is at the edge, the screen will “focus” on that area as you zoom in. Nope. Well, kind of, but not enough. Oddly enough, in such a scenario it’s best to move the mouse to the opposite side of the screen, zoom out, and then move the mouse over the now visible unit before zooming back in. There are view adjustment arrows located on the edge of your HUD, but it would have been so much nicer to let you “push” the screen with your mouse…as every other strategy game developed after 1995 has done.

The game is just plain stupid like that in several ways. Of course the point of the game is to kill the enemy troops, but this is much more involving than it ought to be. Fog of war is a huge issue in LSN, meaning your soldiers can’t see squat. So when you send one to point B, and an enemy suddenly shows up around the next corner and starts shooting, your idiotic marine will keep running until he reaches said point. Then, and only then, will he fire back…if your 10 seconds of “real time” aren’t already used up. Of course, you can also set their reactions before the turn so that anytime a new enemy is spotted, they will stop walking and turn to fire, but this is sadly, one of the very few “tactics” involved in LSN. That’s about as deep as it gets.

Once I finally realized the importance of this “strategy,” I began to wipe the baddies out of the first level…only to eventually give up because I simply couldn’t locate them all. I had cleared the entire map, but apparently some enemies had slipped through my fingers. There was no way to know where they were, and just searching the map again would have taken eons, considering the short distance your troops can move per turn. So rather than click my marines, click where I wanted them to go, hitting “end turn,” waiting for the game to load the AI, waiting for it to calculate the moves, pressing “play,” watching my marine move 10 feet, and repeating 50 times to search the level…I quit and tried playing with the other races. Not much more fun, unfortunately.

None of the press I’ve read sings high praises for LSN’s graphics, but plenty of them describe them as “pretty impressive.” Again, am I playing the wrong game, here? It’s like I’m in some backwards, insane sick joke of a Twilight Zone episode! These graphics, like everything else in the game, remind me of the mid 90’s. Sega! Windows 95! Ace of Base! Nothing is in 3D. There are close to 10 frames of animation. Zooming in more than 50% reveals under detailed, pixilated forms meant to represent your units. Disappointing – like the rest of the experience.

I guess it’s nice that you can play it online via e-mail, but who would want to?



Don’t believe the communist propaganda! This game is a massive waste of your time and money. It’s not even worth the budget price of $20 bucks. Maybe if it came with a copy of Playboy, or something…but no! It reeks of that “made in someone’s garage” aura, or maybe it’s the smell of “this game was created as a final project for my college programming course.” When I turned off the sound entirely in favor of a music CD, the game became twice as enjoyable. That’s sad.

Continue to move, or stop and fire when you see someone? Those are “tactical strategies"??

Completely 2D and entirely outdated. The only nice touch is the rare smoke effects.

There are next to no sounds. You’ll hear nothing more than gunfire. No soundtrack whatsoever.

It’s playable, but just barely – and for no more than 10 minutes.

At least you have more than one race to choose from.