Herzog Zwei
Herzog was first but Dune is much betterGenre: strategy - rts
Publisher: Sega
Year: 1990
System: Genesis
Gameplay Score: 2
Gameplay Notes:
After about an hour of playing I finally figured it out. But man is this game confusing. I get that it's the first RTS ever made. So it's lacking any quality of life features. But the game is completely unapproachable until you figure it out. The key problem is that there are maybe 10 different units you can create with six or seven different orders that you issue them and the only way to do that is to pick them up, change the order and then drop them back down. But the orders are represented with just a small icon. So you have to memorize these icons both for the orders and for the units when you create them. The creation of units is also extremely clunky and the capturing of bases is strange. You have to send four infantry to the base using the capture base order before it becomes yours and then you can create units there. The difficulty is through the roof and not configurable. The controls again are clunky but the movement of your units is responsive enough. When you get hit, there's massive knockback and you run out of energy which causes you to explode and respawn. So in summary, the interface is difficult to understand, there's complexity that I don't care to memorize, the combat isn't particularly interesting, and the difficulty is insane. I know this game is regarded as some hidden gem but I didn't have much fun with it.
Level Design Score: 2
Level Design Notes:
Again, the design is obtuse. There are 10 or so levels but I only played the first one. I assume they get harder as you go and I have no chance of beating even the first level. The maps themselves aren't very large which is probably for the best. The only defining feature of each level are rivers or chasms, which separate areas of the map and restrict movements of land-based units.
Theme Score: 3
Theme Notes:
I like the robots and your Macross mech which transforms between a jet and a walking mech. Has a Transformers like vibe.
Art Style Score: 3
Art Style Notes:
Very simple sprites and backgrounds but the animate okay. Has a very early Genesis look to it but at least it doesn't look like an Amiga port.
Audio Score: 3
Audio Notes:
I enjoyed the music. It was lively and fits the theme. Sound effects for unremarkable
Overall Score: 45
Review ID: 970
My long review, posted in parts since the complete review goes over the character limit. I wrote an original draft but had AI enhance the prose:
ReplyDeleteIn the early nineteen-nineties, in a suburban playroom carpeted in yellow shag, my siblings and I participated in a peculiar ritual. We would approach our cathode-ray television—that hulking apostle of analog entertainment—and ceremonially affix a slab of cardboard down its center with masking tape. The cardboard served as our own Iron Curtain, a physical barrier preventing either player from glimpsing the other's half of the split screen. Only after this makeshift treaty had been ratified could we twist the dial to Channel 4 and commence our campaigns in *Herzog Zwei*, a game whose mechanics I was too young to understand but whose grip on my family's imagination was absolute.
The game, released by Technosoft in 1989 for the Sega Genesis, is now recognized by historians of the form as the progenitor of the real-time-strategy genre—the distant ancestor of *StarCraft* and *Command & Conquer*. Yet *Herzog Zwei* arrived on a console that had no mouse, no keyboard, only a directional pad and three buttons. Precision was sacrificed to accessibility; complexity distilled into something that could be grasped, if never quite mastered, by children fighting over a television. As Eurogamer's Damien McFerran noted, the game was often bundled with the Genesis by desperate retailers trying to offload unsold inventory—thrown in, as it were, because no one knew what else to do with it.
The battlefields were varied and strange: ice caps, volcanic islands, futuristic cities suspended over chasms. Each match began with elegant simplicity. You piloted a transforming mech—blue or red, jet or walking robot with giant gun—and your opponent piloted its chromatic opposite. The objective seemed straightforward: destroy the enemy base. The execution was anything but.
My first attempt at playing, after years of watching my siblings monopolize the screen while I waited for my turn at *Sonic the Hedgehog*, was a disaster born of categorical error. Having cut my teeth on *Thunder Force 2*, I assumed *Herzog Zwei* was another top-down shooter. I flew my jet across the map, mashing the fire button with the confidence of the ignorant. Then I exploded. The game reassembled my mech above my starting base like a pixelated Dr. Manhattan, and I stared, baffled, at the "E" bar at the top of the screen—energy, I would later learn, which depleted as you moved and required regular refueling at friendly bases.
Even after grasping the fuel mechanic, the game resisted comprehension. I fired at ground units from the air; my bullets passed through them like rumors through a small town. An older sibling explained, with the weary patience of the initiated, that I needed to transform into walking mode to engage ground targets. I did. A few units exploded. Progress, of a sort.
DeleteThen: a siren. An S.O.S. icon blinking on-screen like a cardiac monitor in distress. My base was under attack—a motorcycle unit, I would discover, nimble and harassing. I shot it down, refueled, and ventured out again, only to encounter missiles. These heat-seeking projectiles transformed my mech from unchallenged sovereign of the battlefield into quarry. Running back to base for shelter, I watched helplessly as the four red dots indicating my base's allegiance flipped to blue, one by one. Infantry—enemy infantry—were capturing it. When the last dot turned, I could no longer refuel there. Moments later, my main base detonated under concentrated fire, and the match ended. I was, in the parlance of playground discourse, extremely mad. I could never understand the appeal of that cardboard barrier or the crowds of my numerous siblings gathered around the screen in rapt attention.
Years passed. I returned to *Herzog Zwei* as a young adult, this time equipped with the patience that age sometimes confers. I learned to build units: infantry for capturing bases, missile turrets to harass the enemy mech, tanks for frontal assault. I developed strategies—sending infantry in staggered waves to capture neutral bases without wasting fuel on transport, deploying surface-to-air missiles to protect my advancing ground forces. I discovered the art of standing directly beneath an enemy mech in flight to prevent it from landing—bonus points if I had an active SAM unit nearby to pressure the enemy into retreat. I stationed armored cars around my main base to intercept motorcycle harassment. I forced my opponents to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously, sending squads of four infantry wandering the map like autonomous cells, looking for undefended bases to capture while ignoring heavily fortified positions.
I beat the computer across all its environments: valleys, tundra, archipelagos, volcanic wastelands, jungles.
The game's genius, I realized, lay partly in its limitations. Unlike later real-time-strategy titles—games like *Warcraft* and *Dune II*, which established conventions of mouse-driven unit selection and base-building—*Herzog Zwei* required you to command units individually, ferrying them across the map in your mech's cargo hold. You couldn't drag a selection box over a dozen tanks; you had to line them up manually, ordering the rearmost tank forward first so the formation would compress naturally. What seemed like poor interface design was actually tactical depth encoded in constraint.
When the Sega Ages version arrived on Nintendo Switch, it added minimap overlays to the sides of the screen—a quality-of-life improvement that made information accessible without pausing. Good games, I'd come to understand, give you enough information to make good decisions quickly.
DeleteThe game is not without its pathologies. Unit pathfinding is abysmal—roughly equivalent to that of my backyard chickens, who will pace back and forth along a three-foot fence rather than walk around it.
In the map called Abgrund, tanks routinely become stuck in the moat surrounding the enemy base, requiring you to airlift them manually while under fire. Infantry, unable to cross rivers, will shuffle along the bank indefinitely if ordered to capture a base on the opposite shore. On the volcanic map, soldiers will march directly into rivers of lava, their programming apparently lacking even the most basic self-preservation protocols. You half expect them to give a thumbs-up as they sink, molten and defiant, into oblivion.
The best maps—those with the fewest obstructions—suffer from different problems. One expansive battlefield, bisected by a wide river, becomes laggy when the unit count approaches fifty, the game's hard limit. Perhaps the limit should have been lower.
*Herzog Zwei* has enjoyed a modest resurgence in recent years, thanks largely to YouTube retrospectives and online tutorials—resources that provide the context absent from a loose cartridge bought at a flea market. My friends, encountering it without guidance, dismissed it and returned to *StarCraft*. They never gave *Herzog Zwei* the chance it deserved.
My young son has taken to the game recently. He's not yet surpassed me, but he's learning. There is, I think, universal appeal in commanding a transforming robot across hostile terrain, in the satisfaction of a well-executed multi-front assault, in the desperate scramble to refuel under enemy fire. The game retains its identity precisely because nothing else plays quite like it. Later RTS games—*Warcraft II*, *Age of Empires*, *Total Annihilation*—iterated on their own formulas, each refinement building on the last. *Herzog Zwei* remains singular, an evolutionary dead end that happens to be brilliant. Even AirMech, the closest modern approximation, borrowed more from DOTA than from its ostensible inspiration, despite the surface similarities between Herzog mechs and AirMech's plane-robot hybrids.
A game with such deceptive tactical depth that remains unique more than thirty years after its original release deserves commemoration in spite of its technical shortcomings. I give it an 8.5 out of 10. If the path finding were at least as good as StarCraft’s and there were no slowdown, I’d give this game a perfect 10. It became a victim of its own ambition in some ways.
I still await a rematch with my siblings, with cardboard separating our views. They remember the game fondly—the makeshift barrier, the masking tape, the yellow carpet—but they usually politely decline the opportunity to let me snap their winning streak.