Conquest Earth - First Encounter

Sometimes you feel that computer strategy games from the eighties were simply better. You remember a bitmap world where every pixel meant something. Conquest Earth: First Encounter from 1997 is kind of a middle ground — it's no longer primitive, but it still holds that raw atmosphere from the days when strategy meant warfare in the purest sense of the word.

It's a real-time strategy where you command units against alien invaders. The split screen, which was an elegant solution in the nineties for limited processing power, shows you the terrain and several unit types — infantry, tanks, scout vehicles. The goal is straightforward: destroy the enemy, collect resources, build your base. Underground and surface infrastructure are separate, which was quite an interesting idea to give the game an extra dimension.

Playing it won't escape the fact that it's not Age of Empires. Units are controlled in small groups, terrain features actually matter, and the pace is slower. Orders aren't always instantaneous, which frustrates, but at the same time it forces you to plan better. The graphics are functional — square icons, distinguishable units, nothing particularly pretty, but readable. Sounds are quiet, an almost silent game, which lets you hear even your own thoughts.

Conquest Earth isn't terribly original and by 1997 it was already several galaxies away from Command & Conquer. But that's precisely why we remember it as a little thing that had its own charm — ambitious, somewhat unfinished, with that strange atmospheric vacuum that games had when they couldn't quite bring all the hot ideas to completion.

Today it's mainly an interesting rarity. When you play it in an emulator, you realize how hard it was to make strategy games without millions in the budget. It's not the foundation of the genre or a game you'd play now instead of modern stuff. But for someone who wants to know what real-time strategies looked like on the edge of the mainstream, it's a readable lesson from the nineties.