Cannon Fodder
Cannon Fodder is an action-strategy shoot 'em up game developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin Interactive. The game is military-themed and based on shooting action but with a strategy game-style control system. The player directs troops through numerous missions, battling enemy infantry, vehicles and installations. Cannon Fodder has a darkly humorous tone which commentators variously praised and condemned. Its creators intended it to convey an anti-war message, which some reviewers recognised, but the Daily Star and a number of public figures derided the game. In other respects, reviewers highly praised the game, which widely achieved scores of over 90% in Amiga magazines. Amiga Action awarded it an unprecedented score, calling it the best game of the year.
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And you WILL lose a lot of troops, the level design encourages you to split troops, which wasn't possible in the GBC version, and sacrifice them into enemy fire a lot of the time and sometimes the battlefied is so unmerciful your squad gets dropped next to unavoidable projectiles.
However it still feels kind of tedious and overlong like the GBC version, at 72 levels that get kind of repetitive until the last third start having more novel ideas to keep things fresh. I'm pretty sure boring the player wasn't to portray its anti war message (since its provocative tagline is "War has never been so much fun") but instead make you realize how many people die in the battlefield while someone above them carries out plans away from danger, so I would have prefered a much shorter game to carry its point across.
This review contains spoilers
The gameplay loop is a little strange. I’m a little braindead on RTS games (could not get a grasp of Herzog Zwei after multiple attempts), but Cannon Fodder is thankfully pretty easy to pick up on. The controls are a bit strange however. I don’t particularly like how the cursor was retained in console ports, and I would much rather have the d-pad just control my troops instead. It also gets real aggravating a bit too early on, pretty much the instant the bazooka-wielding enemy soldiers are introduced.
I worked on this in early-mid November and ran out of steam after completing about 7 missions, only to later discover there was a total of 24. Maybe 22, definitely one of those, but either way too damn many. I thought about it for a moment and decided I didn’t particularly want to press onward, at least not to completion. It was pretty nifty for the timeframe I was playing it, at least.
I do love the title theme, by the way. As far as video game music goes, it’s one of my favorites. There’s not a whole lot of music in here after that though, and what remains is far less memorable unfortunately.