Carrier Command

Carrier Command casts the player as the commander of a futuristic aircraft carrier that sails across a vast archipelago and fights for control of individual islands against an enemy fleet controlled by artificial intelligence. The game combines strategic management of the entire campaign, including allocating resources and planning progress between islands, with direct control of both the ship itself and its escorting aircraft and amphibious vehicles, between which the player can switch at any time and pilot them from a first-person view through onboard displays.

Each island has its own resources and fortifications, so the player must combine reconnaissance, aerial combat, and ground assaults to capture it and add it to their own network of bases supplying the ship with fuel and ammunition, with inadequate supply able to quickly stall the campaign. On the Amiga, the game offered impressive 3D graphics for its time, with both wireframe and filled models that reacted smoothly to the player's actions, making it one of the technically most ambitious titles of its release date. The player could also issue orders to drones from the commander's bridge, from where they monitored the radar and the state of the entire fleet at once.

Electronic music and the sounds of ship systems heighten the feeling of isolation amid a hostile ocean full of islands, where the player never knows exactly where the next attack will come from. Carrier Command was received at release as an innovative and technically remarkable title that combined the genres of strategy and action simulation in a way that was unusual at the time. It is still cited today as a pioneering game whose open system of fleet command foreshadowed later titles with a similar approach to real-time unit command and free movement across an open map, where the player chooses which front to focus on at any given moment, rather than progressing through just a linear series of separate missions with no bearing on the surrounding events.

Why play it: For fans of the unusual blend of strategy and action simulation, Carrier Command is a pioneering game with open fleet command, whose free movement across the map foreshadowed later titles.