KKND: Krush Kill 'N Destroy

The Good
The thing I like most about KKnD is its atmosphere. There's something about post-apocalyptic games that's very appealing for some reason. Maybe it's because the first other game sharing its theme that immediately springs to mind is Fallout, and Fallout is absolutely one of the best and most humorous RPGs concocted to date. KKnD, like Fallout, shares some of its (dark) humour as well; nasty mission briefings including chopped off heads, units that respond with things like "What the hell?" when you click on them and "Consider it dead" when you have them attack. The various techbunkers spread/hidden throughout the game hold some pretty weird units as well, such as a walking tin man reminiscent to the iron bloke from the Wizard of Oz. And of course there's the joy of recognition when you come across buried versions of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The story of KKnD is rather simple: humanity (at least in the americas) split into two people after the nuclear war; one side fleeing underground, retaining their pre-war technological prowess, and one side staying above ground, being horribly deformed by the radiation and having learned to use and live with the various (oversized) animals on the surface - this by the way being one of the other pleasant aspects. You may remember that 80's cartoon called "Dinoriders". Some of that appeal may have transferred to the elephants and crabs which are mounted with cannons and missile launchers. KKnD was also the first RTS game to introduce unit experience as a feature - units could grow from green to veteran to elite as they killed units. This results in more damage, accuracy, and self-healing properties. Also, infantry have gained a bit more prominence. Each side has a very expensive infantry unit which is even capable of taking out certain vehicles on its own. While mass producing the strongest vehicles is still a sure road to victory, infantry are at least more viable to mix in with your army than they were in C&C (which i always finished with vehicles only)

KKnD had good graphics, awesome sound, decent gameplay. I'd still play it if I wasn't so lazy about re-acquiring it.

The Bad
The problem with KKnD is that it doesn't really add that much to the RTS genre. Theres also little incentive to keep playing the game after you've finished it with both sides. As far as i can recall theres no skirmish option, and online play is rather limited as well. The one time I played it on a LAN, it tended to go out of sync pretty fast.

Aside from that, resource gathering is a bit too slow. Those tankers take their time filling up and driving around. On top of that, there aren't THAT much resources around either, and I always find games with limited resources to be fairly frustrating.

The Bottom Line
This game is still playable, just like C&C. Maybe that's not fair coming from me (I recently discovered Dune II being able to run on XP machines and I had great fun running through its campaigns again) but the graphics really aren't that appalling compared to today's standards. It's a charming clone, and if you can get your hands on a legit version (or at least an ISO) you will find that the briefings alone give some incentive to keep playing. Try it out!