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Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor

PC - Westwood, 1997

Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor is one of those rare games that can be considered lost to the mists of the internet. Most good ‘forgotten’ games will still have small but passionate fan communities going on 20 years, while bad ‘forgotten’ games will have thousands of popular YouTube videos trashing them for hits. Sole Survivor is just bad enough to be properly forgotten.

QuickLinks

Reinforcements Have Arrived
Unit Ready
Low Power
Cannot Deploy Here
Building
Battle Control Online
Construction Complete
Battle Control Terminated

Reinforcements Have Arrived

After the success of Westwood’s invention of the Real-Time Strategy genre with Dune 2, their follow-up Command & Conquer was a massive hit. In 1996, they raised the bar again with Red Alert, the much anticipated follow-up, in what was the golden age of RTS games.

Warcraft II was released the same year, and 1997 saw heavyweights Age of Empires (Ensemble), Total Annihilation (Cavedog) and newcomer 3D RTS Dark Reign (Auran) all released to great acclaim. Starcraft (Blizzard) was being hyped up for a 1998 release.

Right in the middle of this RTS boom from the kings of the genre came Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor, a single-unit, multiplayer-only game built on a last-generation game engine.

Unit Ready

There is no base building at all in Sole Survivor although you do see pre-built structures in multiplayer modes. Instead, each match you take control of a single unit from Command & Conquer and wander around the map trying to kill your opponents online.

There are loads of units to choose from but not all are viable, indeed the patch notes for v1.03 saw some buffs for the least popular units. A Mammoth Tank versus an infantry won't make much sense, so in reality most people are choosing a few types of unit, the meta of the time allegedly skewing towards faster units to rush for crate upgrades at the beginning of the game. It could provide some strategy if the team upgrades mode is on, meaning faster, lighter units could snag crates for the heavier members of their team, but as crates respawn it’s only a matter of time before everyone is dead or full power.

I was surprised to see dinosaurs in the game, it turns out these are from secret missions in the Covert Ops expansion of C&C. The dinosaurs are fun and there is a dinos only mode, but otherwise they are not viable as far as I could tell, and end in swift death.

You can choose your EVA computer voice, the barks of which are firmly entrenched in a whole generation of gamers’ memories which is a nice touch. However, you start to get an idea of the effort that was dedicated to this game when you consider the music was just remixes of existing C&C soundtrack songs.

Sole Survivor often gets compared to MOBAs, or netizens will parrot that it’s the first in the MOBA genre. It’s an interesting idea but not really true at all and I imagine most of those people have not played it. It’s unlikely it directly inspired any MOBAs, or in fact any other games at all. If anything, it more closely resembles a modern battle royale game like PUBG (PUBG Studios, 2017). The multiplayer modes of C&C Renegade (Westwood, 2002) or Sacrifice (Shiny, 2000) were much closer to an FPS MOBA than Sole Survivor is.

In many ways it reminds me of an Action RPG like Diablo (Blizzard, 1997), but in Diablo you choose your class, choose your weapons and armour, customising or at least making choices for your character. In Sole Survivor upgrades are random, you don’t have any say in your unit’s ‘build’ so to speak, which takes away all the fun and attachment to your avatar.

In Diablo you are at least merrily clicking away during combat, whereas in Sole Survivor you click once on an enemy and wait to see who dies. Diablo is very fast paced and reactive, but C&C players will know from experience that every time you click, your tanks will pause and reorient for a moment before moving, and that has not been changed at all in Sole Survivor. That means that the more you try to place your unit strategically during battle, the more likely you are to be a sitting duck.

An ‘attack-move’ ability would help a lot, in which you hold down a key to move your unit around while continuing to fire on the enemy. This function didn’t come along until Red Alert, and wasn’t possible in C&C which Sole Survivor is based on. In Red Alert you can live without it, it’s optional micromanagement for the many units on the battlefield. For Sole Survivor the lack of attack-move means you have nothing to do while your tanks are blasting away at each other.

Deathmatch in Sole Survivor was 50 simultaneous players, which I imagine would have been great fun at least for a while and much more reminiscent of a battle royale game. In fact, as any dial-up gaming aficionados might recognise, I think this has more in common with Subspace (Virgin Interactive, 1997). Subspace was essentially multiplayer deathmatch Asteroids, in which choose your spaceship and fly around in an arena collecting powerups and shooting your opponents. It, too, had capture the flag and football modes, and had been playable since 1995 two years before Sole Survivor was released, during which time it was hugely popular. I suspect this was another inspiration for this diversion of C&C history.

Low Power

You have to get crates to power up, but get too many and you’ll get randomly hit with an ion cannon, Or you’ll get nuked, or other negative effects. Another strange choice, perhaps because without it the game is too straightforward and a later patch gave the option to turn this off. Some crates have fun effects, for example to reset the fog of war for everyone. However with the slow pace of some of the units, it’s probably a bit more frustrating, especially if there are only a few players left on the map. Even with most of the map revealed, each match turns into the end of C&C missions where you’re trying to find that one enemy engineer hiding behind a tree so that the mission will end. Either way, whoever gets the most crates randomly placed near them at the beginning will probably win.

The maps don’t help either. There are only two types of map, desert and temperate, which doesn’t help keep things interesting. Some areas of the maps cannot be accessed, so the only way to get there is by finding a transport pad, the lowest possible effort sprite, a black square. Red Alert had chronosphere effects and C&C even just had normal helipads, so why they just used a plain black square is odd.

Cannot Deploy Here

At the time of writing, the 2022 fan attempt to get online servers functioning was still not released to the public. It’s a huge technical effort to attempt this after 25 years, so I could only try the offline deathmatch practice mode leaving team deathmatch, capture the flag and football modes out of my reach. They are said to be more fun than deathmatch, but only if you have balanced teams of experienced players.

There is another way to play online, in a way. OpenRA, the open source recreation of Red Alert and other Westwood games, also has a Sole Survivor mod. I couldn’t find any online matches so it’s not the most popular mod, but it does have the offline mode in place which is a much smoother experience. It has more units to play with (air units may stifle your practice session by being untouchable by some ground units, but would be quite fun in multiplayer). One thing it omits is the black teleport squares, and it’s all the better for it in my opinion.

More importantly, as OpenRA has many modern bells and whistles, the mod does have attack-move, which really demonstrates how much more engaging the game would have been if you had something to do during battles.

Building

Not much information is available on the development process. I couldn't find any previews or hype about Sole Survivor, and very few reviews, not even retrospectives. It’s barely mentioned in interviews, and certainly not the main subject of them.

We do know the dev team was much smaller than those of the mainline games, which makes sense as it’s essentially a cut-down mod of the original game. Although it was the beginning of the online multiplayer era, most games still provided a campaign or at least fleshed out bot modes. Not much was added to Sole Survivor though, certainly no campaign mode or even AI for offline play of all the game modes. What little was added such as the aforementioned music or sprites were low effort.

Presumably the development costs were very small compared to C&C or Red Alert, so perhaps this was a quick product with an affordable risk that could also recoup some costs from the development of C&C. There is some evidence to back up this idea that it was a strategic product rather than a labour of love.

Joe Kucan was a Westwood talent director who also famously played Kane in multiple games in the series. In an interview about his varied career he poked a bit of good-natured fun, claiming Sole Survivor as his favourite game, but in the few interviews that mention it, the developers brush over it as something of a footnote. They certainly don’t treat it as a huge or important failure, financially or otherwise.

In a 1997 interview with GameSlice, Bret Sperry, co-creator of C&C and CEO of Westwood, barely mentions Sole Survivor but he does hint at some other interesting goings-on at the company.

Battle Control Online

Multiplayer games were coming into their own in the late 90s as the internet became widely adopted, and major developers were starting to bank on multiplayer games in the years to come, such as Quake III: Arena (id, 1999) and Unreal Tournament (Epic, 1999), very much the Blur vs. Oasis of the gaming world. Most games weren’t so multiplayer forward yet though and still focused on providing a single player campaign. Sole Survivor was certainly ahead of its time in that regard.

Westwood Chat was an online messaging and game lobby client that was bundled with Westwood’s licensed Monopoly game (Westwood, 1995), alleged by Hasbro at the time to be the first multiplayer game playable over the internet. With multiplayer a core tenet at Westwood, it was bundled with future games as well.

At the end of 1996 Blizzard launched its Battle.net multiplayer service alongside Diablo, but aside from this action RPG (that Sperry said was his favourite game of 1996) Blizzard’s main trade was as a rival RTS studio. Sperry also recalls how he discussed Battle.net with the Blizzard team, and how they created it as a direct rival to Westwood Chat. Warcraft II was not yet playable on Battle.net, but Westwood seized the high ground and Westwood Chat eventually turned into Westwood Online, a more feature rich client to go up against its rival. Sole Survivor was perhaps a quick tank rush in the overall strategy to win the online war against Blizzard to help bolster Westwood’s online gaming presence.

This bears out in other interviews too.

In a conversation between artist Joseph B. Hewitt IV and producer Rade Stojsavljevic, they discuss how Sperry wanted Sole Survivor to be under the $5 price point, but the publisher had it set at $20. Still not the price of a full game in those days but expensive for such a slight game. Sperry’s lower price point would seem to indicate how much investment they put into it, or perhaps a loss leader to establish online dominance over Blizzard.

They, like co-creator of C&C Joe Bostic, considered Sole Survivor to be a “failed experiment”. Part of that experiment led them down different gameplay avenues. Hewitt recollects that originally all players would start off as infantry, and upgrade to more powerful units depending on which upgrades they found. For example becoming a grenadier if you found grenades, or a tank if you found one and got in for a ride.

This sounds a lot like C&C Renegade, and they are often spoken in the same breath by Westwood staff as experiments in the same vein. Both similar in concept, one was very ambitious with the next gen tech, and one did something more streamlined with last gen tech.

Construction Complete

There is a spark of something here though. You really want to enjoy it, and it’s a neat idea to have the same game played differently, in sort of a reverse of C&C Renegade's completely different FPS game set in the same universe. Sole Survivor always piques people’s interest online until they actually play it. As is, it would have made a very fun multiplayer mode for a mainline C&C game. For a standalone game it needs something more. If you had a persistent character, a nice little tank that was customised to your liking, that would be an improvement. Following the MOBA idea, you could have a choice of upgrades after a certain amount of XP earned instead of random crates, meaning you could create your favoured build type. Or even push the boat out and have a base for each team or player, generating infantry from their barracks, using them as the MOBA ‘creeps’ with the player weighing in when needed, just as happens in C&C Renegade's multiplayer. A decreasing circle to speed up end-games like battle-royales would employ many years later, or even just a special ability for each unit would be something, but the units are exactly as they were in the RTS games. Sadly, lacking any depth of systems, it just feels quite throwaway.

Battle Control Terminated

It didn’t sell many units and the servers shut down in 2002, 5 years after release. That’s a long time compared to how quickly some online games get shut down in the 2020s. But once multiplayer died no one would buy it anymore. The offline practice mode was exactly that, and didn’t include any of the interesting game modes and so Sole Survivor is ironically the sole C&C game not to survive to this day. EA have swept it under the rug, never re-released in the multitude of C&C compilation packs and re-releases in the decades since. Even more telling is that although it does have its own entry, at the time of writing Sole Survivor is not even deserving of being included in the list of published games on Westwood’s Wikipedia article page.

Unit lost.