Z: Steel Soldiers: Zod and Company Return! Company: EON Digital Entertainment We recently got our hands on some press material for the upcoming game Z: Steel Soldiers. Being developed by the Bitmap Brothers, Steel Soldiers is the second game in the Z universe, following, err, Z. Considerable changes have been made in the way the game works, however, and the way that it is presented. It?s also planning to come to both the PC and the Mac, it seems. Perhaps the most obvious change of all is the shift to a 3D engine from the 2D tile-based engine of Z. The use of 3D is intended to be realistic -- valleys can be used as choke-points, bombardment from on-high has its advantages, and so on. With a fully-rotatable and movable camera, viewing the battles from any necessary direction looks to be a simple matter. Steel Soldiers also plans on using more realistic units. The units are ?based upon real-life vehicles,? letting us draw parallels between the actual military equipment and the equipment in the game, cutting down on the learning time. Another big change is the addition of resources, in the form of Xenonite -- any old-school Bitmap Brothers fans in the audience? Territories of control still exist, as in Z, but now each territory produces a certain amount of Xenonite. Of course, the places with lots of Xenonite production are undoubtedly the hardest to maintain control of, which should make for an interesting back-and-forth game. Finally, the Bitmap Brothers are going to take the world of Z a little more seriously than they did in the original title. This could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing -- I certainly laughed my ass off the first time I saw the intro to the original game, and I hope that not all of the humor is lost. But it seems they want to market it at the people who remember the original, years ago, and want to play this new entry into the world. Smart decision, that. So while Z: Steel Soldiers will have to work to make itself seen as something more than the droves of real time strategy games out there, the Bitmap Brothers certainly have the wherewithal to pull it off -- Speedball 2100 aside. We?ll let you in on the action when we get our hands on a copy. -Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon