J2ME: 3D Cloud Commander

•Developer: Fishlabs
•Publisher: THQ Wireless
•Genre: 3D Action


Rule number one in game making: never ever ever EVER mix up your genres. If you're gonna make a great strategy game, go ahead and do it. If you're going to create a new genre, a hybrid of action and strategy, go ahead and do it. But never make a game whereits one thing for a moment, and another the next. That's because one man's religion, is another man's heresy! And this is the exact mistake that was has made here.
Come in Cloud Commander, one of the earlier games developed by Fishlabs using the Abyss Engine, and published under THQ wireless. And no, its not a game where you command clouds, rather, u pilot a plane that looks totally like a World War 2 relic, yet fires weird blobs of fire and missiles! You first start by piloting a plane from the cockpit, and must attempt to destroy all enemy crafts before they gun your down first. Due to the difficulty in controls, the game quickly becomes a game of attrition! Forget piloting skills to avoid enemy fire, you'll never be able to do that. Instead, just take the load thrown at you, and try your best to locate the buzzing crafts going around you and take them down. As you can see, it's a huge flaw in a fighter simulator. The next flaw, comes after the level, when you suddenly find yourself viewing top down on your plane, arcade style, and must guideyour plane as it zooms towards obstacles. The game then alternates between arcade, first person simulator, arcade, and back again to the simulator mode again. This of course means that the player must have a liking for BOTH arcade style gameplay as well as simulators.
The graphics for the game, although 3D, are rough at best especially in simulator mode. The landscape you fly above doesn't seemto change at all, and you'll have no idea if you've moved at all if you used the ground as a navigation guide. The graphics andanimations are much smoother in the arcade mode, the landscape detailed, and beautifully rendered. Although you're basically just flying in a canyon, so even that beauty is limited, no true test of the graphic engine's potential. However, the game does sport some really cool original soundtracks, especially the menu music which gives the game the professional mobile game feel