Turn-based war games have been around consoles since at least the NES days, and they usually offer a nice alternative to deeply involved games where a turn could take upward of an hour or more. Military Madness: Nectaris is an update to the previous TG-16 and PS1 games in the series, and it does a competent job of keeping true to console traditions. Set on the moon, this game pits two or more similar sides taking turns moving various sci-fi infantry and vehicles around a small map, attacking one another while trying to capture important objectives. It works well enough, though it mostly plays ’by the book’ and takes few risks.
Your main goal is to either destroy the enemy side, or capture their base. It’s also important to secure factories, and you’ll have a variety of units you can use toward these tasks. Various tanks, aircraft, light vehicles, and so on have their strengths and weaknesses against one another, and all units exert a ’zone of control’ to their surrounding hexes. You’ll gain bonuses in combat by surrounding your target in zones of control before attacking, so a mix of maneuverable units and durable front-line attackers is important. Infantry are also available, and while most of them are both weak and slow they are perhaps the most important units in the game; they’re the only ones who can capture factories and bases.
Controlling factories is important since they both provide new units and allow you to repair damaged groups. You’ll also have to strike a balance between using them to advance on the enemy and keeping these factories protected, because any of your units undergoing repairs within will become the enemy’s should they manage to get an infantry unit inside. Combined with the generally small map size, most battles naturally consist of an initial push, some heavy fighting, then a brief repair/regroup period before a climatic fight near one side’s base. It’s also possible to sneak an infantry unit onto their base to end the fight early, though this usually requires ferrying troops in via transports and hoping your opponent isn’t paying attention. A few other ways to win do appear in some modes, but base captures and crushing the enemy are the main ways you go about playing.
While there is some depth in Military Madness by virtue of how all the various units relate to one another (some are ’good all around’, others counter specific units well but lose to others, etc.), it is admittedly somewhat simple. This is to be expected of a console war game, but it’s doubly the case here since most of the game mechanics are rooted in the early 1990s. It’s not bad, just dated and somewhat simple.
As expected of this kind of game, you get both a singleplayer campaign and multiplayer. Actually, you get two campaigns; one at normal difficulty, the other meant to be notably harder. There are a few dozen stages between them, most lasting anywhere from around five to twenty minutes in a nod to this game’s tendency to encourage quick battles. Most of these maps are a reasonable challenge, though a few are too ’puzzle-like’ and expect you to make the exact right set of moves in sequence, something I’m not fond of.
Multiplayer is interesting, and keeps players on a set of chess clock style timers; you have to play quickly. Some multiplayer modes also offer a customizable commander unit, though others just give you a ’default version’ of it. Local multiplayer is supported, up to four players on one controller if need be, but online play is a problem. Over several days, I tried repeatedly to find someone to play with and had no luck at all. That the online play appears to be deserted is unfortunate, and worth bearing in mind if you won’t have any local friends to play with.
Ultimately, Military Madness is a simple war game. It encourages fast combat, and most of its depth revolves around specific unit match-ups along with the varying speeds of each vehicle. While simple, it is by no means bad. There are better entries in this genre to be had, but $10/800 Microsoft Spacebucks is a fair price for what you’re getting here, and fans of this style of game will probably like it.
