Carnage Heart is a complex tactical battle sim that covers troop
deployment, economics and R&D.  Personally, I think it's a great game, but
it's absolutely not for everyone.  Individual battles are nicely-done,
fully animated 3D shootouts, but the game contains no live action at all.
More on that later.  The player's major concerns are troop construction and
movement.  That said, Carnage Heart isn't a dry exercise in battle
maneuvres, if you find that sort of thing dry.  That isn't its forte,
anyway.  This game really feels like it belongs on a real computer, no
offense to the game console crowd.  It has menus and dialog boxes!  Still,
it works pretty well, considering that the D-pad makes an awkward mouse.  
I haven't tried using the mouse, and I've seen no mention of it in the
instruction manual, though it's terrifically obvious it should work with
one.

  The game is built on the entertaining, politically neutral premise that
in the not-too-distant future, a world government is duking it out with a
trillion-dollar private corporation over the mineral rights to the moons of
Jupiter.  A game consists of your choice of three equivalent scenarios:
easy, medium and hard.  Each consists of half a dozen or so maps.  Beat the
game at one map and you progress to the next, generally more challenging
map until you run out of maps to conquer.  Each map is sprinkled with
supply and manufacturing centers for you and your evil opponent.  I won't
say whether that's the government or the corporation.  The first to own
every center on a map wins.  You win an enemy center by building battle
units at your own centers, marching them over to the center in question and
swamping the units your enemy has built to defend it.

  The tactics are all pretty straightforward stuff and not the main point
of the game.  Really, the tactical part feels like a quickly painted
backdrop for the real game.  The main point of Carnage Heart is designing
and building your troops.  Troops are basically battle mechs (is it Death
by Lawyer to say that?).  Carnage Heart calls them OKEs, which stands for
something, but smells like "mech."  You design a new OKE by picking about a
dozen mechanical attributes: body style, weaponry, armour, paint job, that
kind of thing, and highly important, its battle software.  Finally, we're
getting to the heart of Carnage Heart.  While you don't directly control
your troops in battle, you do program their behaviour beforehand.  In the
politically neutral but humanitarian-ly advanced future, people don't kill
each other in wars; they send proxies.

  It's easy to cobble together the mechanical bits that make a battle
robot, but it takes a lot of effort to build a suitable battle program.  
A mech does only exactly what you tell it to do during a battle.  Or more
precisely, what you've previously told it to do.  If you tell it to do
nothing at all, it will stand in place and be an unflinching bullet sponge.
  If you're into computers and remember Core Wars, that's the basic idea,
though I do Carnage Heart a disservice by drawing the comparison.  In each
individual battle, you and your opponents are placed on a three-dimensional
arena spiced with annoyances like obstacles and minefields.  You must build
a program which avoids the bad things, finds the bad guys and kills them
before they kill you.
  I called the arena three-dimensional: it's actually a plane with objects
on top, including your pieces.  Your movements are at first confined to
walking around on the plane and dodging bullets.  Eventually, when you get
flying mechs, you'll be able to move up and down as well.  Throughout the
game, you observe battles from a camera angle which is free to move in any
3D direction.

  The programming part of Carnage Heart is the most involved, the most
interesting, and the most tedious.  You're not writing Fortran code, but
you are building a complex program using a 12-button controller.  Or
rather, some of the buttons on a twelve-button controller.
  From a palette of several dozen possible program instructions, you build
a complete program by placing instructions on a grid and tying them
together.  The instruction manual calls these instructions "chips," so with
a nod I wouldn't give for the name "OKE," that's what I'll call them.
  The available chips are things like "move forward," "scuttle sideways,"
"branch if enemy detected," "shoot enemy."  So you can quickly build a
program which makes your OKE sit in place and spin like a dog: drop a "turn
left" chip at the beginning of the program and you have a deadly, spinning,
doglike bullet sponge in your arsenal.
  Many chips are highly configurable.  You can, for instance, tell whether
there are any mines within 20 meters in an arc 61 degrees wide centered at
6 degrees to right of front.  Once you know this fact, you can decide
whether you want to go that way.  So you can easily build a program, using
three chips, which fires only on enemies within 100 meters in a 90 degree
arc to the front, but not if there's a friendly unit within 80 meters
anywhere in the same arc.  Such a program will gleefully pound a friendly
unit at 81 meters, if it happens to be standing between you and your
target.  This is either an annoyance, or a challenge.  If it's a challenge,
you'll like this game.
  Programs are created by laying out instruction chips in a grid, say, 8 by
8, and the process is tedious, tedious.  Execution runs from the top-left
corner to the bottom-right.  There are branch instructions (go to the
"fire" chip only if the "detect enemy" chip says it's the thing to do) but
that's the extent of program control.  There's no concept of a subroutine
and, worst of all, there's no way to arbitrarily branch from one location
to another.  So the greatest challenge of building a decent program is
cramming all the paths of execution into a square grid with no overlap.
It's rather like pushing wet string into a box through a small hole.  In
the dark.  With vaseline on your hands and fire ants in your hair.  Really.
It's just like that.  It's an annoyance, or a challenge.
  On the other hand, kudos to the game staff for building a programming
interface -- any kind of interface at all -- using a game console
controller.  They built something straightforward and relatively easy to
understand.  You need not be a computer hacker to build a decent program,
and it's a lot of fun to watch your little creation grope around and kill
things.  It's fun, that is, if it's not a total idiot.  It's easy to build
a program that will shuffle straight up to the nearest rock and get stuck
behind it.  It's an annoyance, or a challenge.
  To make the game playable by those who don't want to invest hours to put
together a good, killer program, Carnage Heart comes pre-loaded with
default programs which you can use if you like.  It didn't take me very
very long to write my own program which will pretty much always win against
the automatic program.  Weapons and armour equipment being equal between
the sides, as they are more or less, you'll be much stronger in battle with
a good battle program.  I've played the easy and medium scenarios.  If your
troops are run by good battle programs, and you're careful to keep up with
the latest armaments, you won't have any trouble beating the tactical game.

  As a game progresses from map to map, your opponent is building newer,
more dangerous, mechs, and you have to keep up by doing the same.  Most
often, this means cruising a list of arms merchants and snapping up their
latest gear.  Sometimes it means noticing a weakness in your battle
programming and taking time between turns to make changes.
  It's difficult to change a program in a major way, so occasionally, it
means completely overhauling your program for another.  This also happens
on the occasions when one of the arms merchants makes available a
completely new kind of battle mech which it'd be a shame not to pick up and
use.  Always, each mech comes with a default program to use or not.

  As I alluded to above, another important aspect of the game is better
equipment with which to build your pieces.  I'll only mention briefly the
list of half a dozen arms merchants who are carrying on R&D throughout the
game.  An important part of gameplay is cruising these suppliers for new
equipment and optionally greasing a few palms to speed development of some
particularly interesting-looking newfangled weapon, or even a larger
programming grid.  This is another interesting and entertaining side issue
in a complex game.
  Unfortunately, arms development happens identically in the easy and
medium and presumably, the hard scenarios.  So if the Cryon missile did
well for you last game, you can plan on it showing up again, at the same
merchant, at about the same time.  The six arms merchants offer competing
wares; someone else always soon develops something slightly better than the
last kick-butt piece of equipment you bought.  This is an interesting and
well-done part of the game, but repeat playability would have benefited
from a little randomness.

  As a game progresses, you'll watch battles closely to spot (and hopefully
correct) weaknesses in your mechs' programmed strategy.  And I do mean
you'll watch.  Every single battle is played out in complete detail.  On
turn 30, which is to say, after battle 20, you'll be wishing for a way to
skip the animation and get on with it.  But since that's impossible, the
middle of battle 20 is a fine time to hit the kitchen.
  While I've harangued Carnage Heart's designers for making me sit through
twenty animated battles too many, I should point out they are a lot of fun
to watch.  The battles are entertaining, nicely done and instructive, if
you're concerned about bettering your battle program.  You can watch from
any of several useful camera angles (including free motion).  As each new
body style comes into play as a game unfolds, it's interesting to watch
their capabilities and kick yourself for not buying one of your own.
  The flying OKEs remind me of War of the Worlds, the Movie.  Their
standard programming makes them float up over the battlefield, pound the
daylights out of an enemy unit, then veer off silently to find someone else
to harm.  The graphics and sound are all done very well, even to the point
that the flying mechs are a little eerie.  The four-legged OKEs have a
wonderful, anthropomorphic way of flinching when they take a hit.  Rockets
and missiles are also particularly well done.

  As I mentioned, I liked this game a lot, but it has a small target
audience.  It also will do very poorly in the obligatory scale-of-ten
ratings, because it doesn't really fit the mold:

  Graphics: 7 (the animations are smooth and pretty, but only part of the game)
  Sound: 7 (nice effects and good sound tracks, but after six hours you'll
    turn it down and warm up the stereo)
  Playability: 3 (programming and troop movement are tedious)
  Repeatability: 3 (your second game will play very much like your first,
    though keep in mind a game runs many hours)
  Interesting gameplay: 2 to 10, depending on whether it's a challenge or
    an annoyance.  I had a blast, but I can't promise you the same.
  Manual: long but incomplete, like this review.
  Memory Card:  5 Blocks

  Carnage Heart is a thoughtful, sometimes tedious, respite from the last
fighting game you played; the one where you were whipped by a six-year-old
mashing random buttons on the controller.

-Grendel