Sega Ages Herzog Zwei

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local, Online)

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Review:

Herzog Zwei, originally released in 1990 on Sega Genesis, is one of the most influential videogames that many modern players have never heard of. The sequel to the Japan-only 1988 game Herzog, Herzog Zwei is cited by some as the first Real-Time Strategy game ever made. The truth is a bit more murky, as there are earlier games that can lay claim to that title depending on how you define the genre, but just to give you an idea, the term “Real-Time Strategy” was first coined a whole two years later for the game Dune II… a game that was directly inspired by Herzog Zwei. other games to list Herzog Zwei as a major influence include Warcraft, Starcraft, and Command and Conquer.

Of course, being a game that is now 35 years old, you would expect that it might not have aged very gracefully, and that is something that this Sega Ages re-release, brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020, seeks to address. While preserving the core gameplay and presentation of the original game, this release adds in a wealth of new “Quality of Life” improvements that people take for granted in modern Real-Time Strategy games, adding a full interactive tutorial, a mini-map, and on-screen stat readouts for you and your opponent. In addition, this release also includes options you often see in modern re-releases of classic games, such as button remapping and an instruction manual included in the game’s menus.

As I noted, the game’s presentation remains largely untouched here, and unlike some other parts of the game, this has mostly aged fairly well, with its 2D pixel art visuals and chiptune soundtrack still having a lot of great retro style. This is joined by mostly-static anime-style 2D artwork in the game’s new tutorial, with a digitized voice clip to add even more personality.

Despite its age, and its hugely influential status within the genre, Herzog Zwei also remains fairly unique within the genre, with players moving units and surveying the battlefield not by moving a cursor, but by maneuvering a transforming mech that can actively participate in the battle. This mech has its own health, ammo, and fuel to keep track of, and while the mech can regenerate at your home base if it is destroyed, the loss of time this can cause can make the difference between victory and defeat.

Unfortunately, this one gameplay element that makes Herzog Zwei unique and special even today also makes in unwieldy and frustrating. Unit AI in this game is as dumb as rocks, is terrible at pathfinding, and often gets themselves stuck in a ditch, behind a tree, or even behind other units. This really forces players to have to babysit every unit they want to move or reassign to a different task, and since you can’t interact with these units via a cursor or menu, you have to haul your mech back and forth across the map to get anything done in this game.

That’s tedious enough already, but it’s made even worse by just how much of a fuel hog your mech is, barely able to make it from one side of the map to the other before running dry and crashing. You’ll need to stop off at bases to refuel just to get around, and when you’re carrying units to and fro you expend even more fuel than usual.

Another issue with this game is that its menus are unhelpful, forcing players to memorize all its icons and abbreviations for both actions and units. It’s kinda’ silly that the game expects players to be able to remember the difference between giving an AT-101 order to an ARM-51D and giving an AT-101H to a SAM-42, and though units all look different and commands have different icons, the units are tiny and can be difficult to distinguish from each other, and the command icons are frequently unhelpful. Add to this controls that are often unintuitive, and you have a recipe for confusion in a game where you need to be quick to make decisions.

Make no mistake, this is absolutely the best way to play one of the most important and influential videogames ever made, a landmark of the Real-Time Strategy genre. It does a lot to improve and update the game to make it playable by modern standards. But as improved as it is, that gulf between what this genre once was and what it has now become is just far too wide, as as much as I appreciate all the hard work that went into improving this game, I feel like it needed more to make it function by today’s standards. Because of this, Herzog Zwei is a fascinating relic of the past, and an interesting history lesson for anyone curious about the early days of the Real-Time Strategy genre, but not a game I would recommend to most modern fans of that genre.

tl;dr – Herzog Zwei is an extremely influential Real-Time Strategy game originally released on Sega Genesis, and this Sega Ages release of the game does quite a lot to bring the game up to modern standards. Unfortunately, it just isn’t enough, as there are just far too many clunky and tedious game mechanics and incomprehensible menus to make this game enjoyable next to modern entries in the genre. The result is that Sega Ages Herzog Zwei is better as a conversation piece than a game.

Grade: C

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