Scorched Planet

When I first launched Scorched Planet, I expected something like Scorched Earth in 3D. Instead, I got something completely different — a tank simulator in the truest sense of the word, one that doesn't entertain and doesn't even try. It's 1996, the graphics are polygonal and rather painful to look at, but what else could you expect from what your average PC was capable of back then.

Scorched Planet is a single-player tank shooter with a realistic bent. You drive a tank through space scenery and shoot at enemy units. The goal is straightforward: survive waves of attacks, destroy as many enemies as possible, and complete missions. It's not social entertainment or stylish action — it's a dull but functional piece of game you'll play for a moment and then forget.

The controls are clunky, as befits a simulator. Your tank creeps along, you rotate the turret, adjust the gun angle — all through keyboard combinations. Movement is slow, the graphics are ghastly, and there's barely anything that would tempt you to keep going. No animation, almost no sounds that make sense. It plays like medieval software that should have been a decade older.

Yet — and this is important — it's not a bad game. It's simply a game that arrived twenty years too late and looked like it had arrived forty years too late. It had no ambition, no style, no character. In the nineties it was a curious artifact; today it's just a historical relic.

These days you'll only pick up Scorched Planet out of nostalgia or pure rationality — you want to see how poorly things could be made in DOS. It's a computer classroom without the fun. Few know it, and there's no reason everyone should go looking for it. But when you find it in an archive, you'll know: well, so this is it.