Krush Kill ‘N Destroy 2: Krossfire

I came to KKND2: Krossfire the same way most people do in 2024 - through a retro itch and a low price point. As a shooter guy, RTS isn't my home turf, but fast-aggression strategy with a post-nuke theme and three asymmetric factions is the kind of thing that makes a Saturday disappear. The short version: it scratches that late-90s Command and Conquer itch in ways that still feel legitimate, but it arrives with a caveat stapled to its forehead that you cannot ignore. The three factions are genuinely distinct, which matters more than anything else in an RTS this old. The Survivors bring conventional hi-tech military hardware - anaconda tanks, enforcers, the kind of arsenal that rewards methodical play. The Evolved counter that with mutant biology: mastodons, giant scorpions, and at the top of the tech tree a Scourge Demon unit you construct by sacrificing five infantry, which is as unhinged as it sounds. The Series 9 robots are farming machines gone sentient and violent, fielding units named Seeder, Weed Killer, and Spore Missile - farm tools repurposed for apocalyptic warfare. That faction identity alone puts KKND2 above a lot of its era contemporaries. Oil fields are your resource engine, mobile platforms drill them, and the triangle-shaped campaign map forces you into two-front pressure pretty much constantly. The AI holds up better than you'd expect from a 1998 game. It reportedly adapts to your attack patterns - deploy air units repeatedly and it starts countering with anti-air, probe the same flank twice and it reinforces there. It is not a pushover even on normal difficulty. That said, the balance issues are real and well-documented: base defenses hit like freight trains and absorb punishment that would feel broken in any modern title, which nudges skirmishes into war-of-attrition territory rather than clean tactical exchanges. Unit countering is also stark - some matchups feel less like strategy and more like rock-paper-scissors with bigger explosions. Here is the thing you absolutely need to know before purchase. Multiplayer is technically included but officially unsupported in this release. The Steam page says it plainly. If live PvP is your reason for looking at this, walk away. The community has community-patched workarounds and there is a HD mod floating around that bumps the game to 1080p at 60fps, which Ziggurat's barebones port does not provide out of the box. There are also known bugs - unit build errors and random mission failures in long singleplayer sessions - with player-written guides needed to navigate them. For a paid re-release, that is a rough state of affairs. Who this actually suits: RTS players who grew up with the original, anyone who wants an aggressive fast-paced skirmish game with a darkly comic tone, and people who know how to apply a community patch without filing a support ticket. If you need polished netcode, a ranked ladder, or reliable co-op, this is not the game. If you want 40 hours of singleplayer campaign content spread across three asymmetric playthroughs and you are not too precious about technical rough edges, it delivers more than the price implies. Fred, Scout Team