Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs is a sort of port of the 1998 PC game Battlezone. It’s a hybrid of a vehicle-based first person shooter and a real time strategy. It’s very ambitious kind of game to port to the N64. However, it’s not a direct port, as the was mostly rebuilt for N64. It features the standard campaigns from the PC version and a short additional campaign of its own.

The game’s menu is rather confusing, it has what looks like a difficulty menu of Arcade, Pilot and Commander; yet these are different moves. Arcade is its own separate mode of killing waves of enemies. Pilot and Commander follow the same campaign, but with objectives based on either driving or more focused on giving orders (although you still do a bit of both in each campaign).

When it comes to piloting the vehicles, the controls are solid. You move using the C-buttons, aim with the analogue stick, shoot with Z, and use the jump thrusters (often used to slow down descents). Aiming is quite difficult, though, as your weapons are all quite slow, so you need to adjust your aim to try and hit your fast-moving targets. It does have a good sense of speed.

You can also jump out of your vehicle and walk around, this is mainly to use the most powerful weapon in the game: the sniper rifle (which you carry on your person and has very limited ammo).

For the RTS side of the game, you unfortunately don’t swap views to issue troop orders. You have to be close to what unit you command and issue orders with the D-Pad. It’s a bit out of the way, but it gets the job done. It is a limited system, as you can’t queue tasks or issue multiple orders at a time, which is definitely a faff when you have to drive away from the units to complete objectives.

While it sounds promising and the core systems work well, the missions themselves are still structured like an RTS game, although a bit simpler. This means enemy units take time to build up and to get to you. So when you have to defend an area, you can be waiting 5 minutes for an enemy to show up. In a typical RTS, you’ll be doing multiple tasks at once so you’re not just twiddling your thumbs, but this is just one thing at a time.

The graphics also get in the way. There’s an immense amount of fog, which is made worse by a useless radar (which is your only map). You have to follow waypoints which seems simple enough, but then a giant mountain will appear out of nowhere, and it can sometimes take half an hour to figure out the way past it.

Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs is definitely an interesting game and the core gameplay was translated really well to the N64, but poor level design really hampers the experience.

Fine

So what we have, in the end, is a game that tries hard, in fact probably tries too hard to do too much, and it suffers as a result. there’s plenty here to enjoy, but it takes a concerted effort and even then, Battlezone never really takes off.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #40. Review Score: 73%

Remake or remaster?

There’s a remake of the PC version called BattleZone 98 Redux. Hopefully the N64 levels get added in at some point.

Official ways to get the game.

There’s no official way to get the N64 version of Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs, but a remake of the PC version is on GOG and Steam.