The Show

It's the year 2097 and after a long civil war California finally got its will and split with the USA. Under the reign of dictator and media mogul Lou Baxter the newly formed state declared to be the Republic of California. Of course the masses aren't very happy to live in a police state so Lou invents the TV show "The Show" in which political enemies and dissidents need to fight "for their freedom" as he calls it. In reality they are basically just getting slaughtered in front of the cameras. As you might guess, the democratic east doesn't tolerate this and sends in Major Frank Harris who infiltrates the show in order to destroy it from the inside. So you take control over Frank Harris and Team Outlaw and fight your way to the generator that powers the island on which "The Show" takes place.

The island actually consists of several platforms that are several kilometers high, 500x500 metres in diameter and float in front of the coast of California. The top of a platform is covered with holo-emitters which allow Lou to form totally different conditions for every match. The modules themselves are hollow and contain all the prisoners and the equipment. This means you need to build several kinds of elevators for infantry and mechs in order to move these reinforcements to the top and into your fight.

The resources needed to build new buildings and recruit new units are Credits, Energy and Communication channels. While you need to build generators to get Energy and upgrade your elevator and headquarters to increase the number of available Communication channels, the only way to get credits is to conquer the outposts on the map. But you can't conquer them any way you want to. They are all connected with one another and your are only able to conquer outposts that have a connection to another outpost you own. The outposts are also a fast way of transportation since you can send in your units at one outpost and then order them to get out of another one you own.

You do not only fight on top of the platforms but also inside of them because your goal still is to destroy them all. Often you receive a special mission in which you need to take a group of infantry, while you are fighting in front of the cameras, down into the heart of the module and for example retrieve a communication device so that you can communicate with the mole inside "The Show".

The game features ten multiplayer-maps for four players with three different modes: Conquest, Sudden Death and Co-op.* Conquest is the normal Deathmatch in which you need to destroy the all the enemy headquarters on a map.

• Sudden Death plays much faster than Conquest because the goal is just to conquer an enemy outpost before the enemy conquers one of yours.

• Co-op is basically Team deathmatch which means that you play with a friend against another team of two players. The goal is again to destroy all enemy headquarters.