Scorched Earth

Back in the nineties, shareware was big business.  You would get a small part of the full game to play as many times as you wanted and if you wanted the full game you would mail in the cost of the game to the publisher and they would send you the full game.  This is pretty much how demos work nowadays but back then the internet wasn’t as robust as it is now.  One of those shareware games was a game called Scorched Earth.  I played that shareware version countless times but never bought the full game.  Decades later, playing the full game now is just as fun as it was back when I was a kid.

Scorched Earth is an artillery game where up to ten players fight it out to see who is the last one standing.  When you start your game you have a slew of options to pick from.  How many players, starting money, how many rounds, how the landscape is generated, ect.  Once you decide all of this you get to choose your player tank and decide how smart each AI opponent is (if you choose to have AI in your game).  You then use your starting money to buy offensive weapons and defensive systems.  The weapons variety is decent and ranges from napalm, nukes, and my personal favorite the Death Hand which is basically a cluster bomb.  Defensive items include parachutes and different types of shielding.

Once you get to the battle screen you take turns shooting each other until only one tank is left.  When it is your turn, you can use a shield if you have one, select your missile, adjust your angle of fire and the power of your shot.  This is when the strategy of the game comes in.  Do I use a regular missile and go for a direct shot, blast the mountain with a nuke to destroy most of it and watch the enemy tanks fall to their death, or use napalm to weaken their shields?  These are some of your options and many more depending on what kind of choices you made when buying items.  If enabled, wind is also a factor in aiming your shots.  Tanks can be damaged which reduces the max power of their shots so sometimes all you need to do is damage them and that will make them useless against you.

When a tank dies it will do either a small effect when it gets destroyed or it will do a massive damage attack which has the chance to take out other tanks around it.  If the AI are the only tanks left they will continue to fight until only one is left.  In between rounds you can buy new gear with the money you earned in the previous round or off the interest from the money you didn’t spend.  You then go back onto another randomly generated map and do it all over again.  This will go one until you finish the final round in which whoever one the most rounds is the winner.

This is an early nineties game so the graphics are nothing great.  The tanks have basic detail to them while the maps have overall basic designs to them.  The weapon effects are slightly better, but are still on the basic side of things.  The sound effects are minimal at best.  With all of that said, what is presented here is all that is needed to showcase the gameplay of the game.

Admittedly, it has been a long time since I have played Scorched Earth.  However, when I started playing it for this review, like riding a bike, everything came back to me.  While a game like this may not impress people nowadays, back when it came out this was a good game.  The amount of options it gives you to customize your game can lead to a lot of replay ability.  Along with the gameplay which still holds up today and you have a game that can bring you a lot of enjoyment.