"It's not really sensible, but they're right about it being fun."

Sensible Software was arguably the best game developer that most people in America have never heard of. This is primarily because Sensible Software was based in the UK at a peculiar time in European gaming history. While we were busy with our consoles and DOS-running PCs, Europe, whose gamer community was hindered by the lack of interest from the Japanese and the asinine censorship policies of Germany, was based mostly in the realm of alternative computers such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, computers that were looked at with little more than a shrug by everyone else. The game developers that dominated there were the local ones who had the ability and motivation to cater their releases to a European audience, which gave European gaming a very different flavor from gaming in Japan or America. Before its eventual decline and purchase by the internationally much better known developer Codemasters (which also started as one of those local UK developers), Sensible Software churned out megahit after megahit, the foremost among these being Wizball, Sensible World of Soccer, and, of course, Cannon Fodder.

As the name suggests, Cannon Fodder is a not-so-serious (or sensible, for that matter) look at the world of warfare. The game is played from a top-down perspective using the tiny sprites that were Sensible's trademark. You control a squad of anywhere between one and six soldiers (depending on the level) who are manipulated through pointing and clicking, or as close to it as the Mega Drive allows. You can move around the map with a click of one button and attack with a machine gun by holding down the other, much like a modern RTS. You can also switch to grenades, which are useful against targets that are nearby and/or behind walls, or rockets, which are useful against distant targets that have the ability to kill you before you can get into range to kill them. At first, your enemies consist only of novices whose weapons don't even have the reach of your gun, but eventually you'll have to deal with bazooka soldiers and elite machinegunners. Eventually you'll have access to rocket turrets and armed vehicles such as tanks and helicopters to help you out, but the enemy will get those as well.

Cannon Fodder contains 24 missions, each of which are made up of between one and six phases. Each mission takes place in one of several locales (jungle, desert, arctic, etc.) and each phase requires you to complete certain objectives. Usually these objectives are "kill all enemy" (sic) and/or blowing up buildings from which the enemies stream a la Gauntlet, but sometimes you also have to rescue hostages or do other things. These objectives can often be deviously simple; while some missions are simple run-and-gun affairs, others require you to think about what you're doing. For example, at first it may look like a phase will be really difficult to complete, but it turns out that there's a trick or a method that will make things much easier. You can split your squad into up to three groups to help you out. There's a surprising amount of variety that the developers have managed to squeeze out of the basic concept so that the game never gets repetitive. If I had to describe Cannon Fodder with one phrase, it would be "Lemmings with guns."

The best part of Cannon Fodder isn't the gameplay, however; it's the amount of social commentary that has been applied with various levels of subtlety. The game's name is the most obvious example of the message that war is senseless and doesn't accomplish anything worthwhile, but there are plenty of others. Perhaps the most infamous is the game's theme song, which unfortunately didn't make the conversion to consoles intact. Entitled "War (Never Been So Much Fun)," this song contains the lyrics "Go up to your brother/Kill him with your gun/Leave him lying in his uniform/Dying in the sun." (It's also one of the best songs ever written for a computer game, but that's irrelevant to the point.) The characters you play with each have names (though they unfortunately sometimes repeat; the most obvious, likely intentional, example of this is when the name "Steve" shows up twice almost in a row) but aside from that they're all totally interchangeable. They gain ranks from private to four-star general, but all this signifies is how long they've managed to survive and how many enemies they've managed to kill. The death tallies are kept in a scoreboard on top of the screen between missions, complete with enemy deaths being counted as points for "home" and your own deaths being points for "away." This same pre-mission screen is dominated by a hill which acts as a graveyard; each death on your side causes a new tombstone to sprout up. There is also a line of prospective soldiers that queues up right in front of this hill; for every tombstone that appears on the hill, a new recruit happily marches through a gate below it, just like the assembly line at a sausage factory. You get more recruits the farther you get in the game; you get a maximum of 360 soldiers to complete the game with. It's nearly impossible to beat the game without cheating and not lose at least one of them; chances are most of them will be dead by the end. There are also civilians, but in most missions they're nothing more than what they are in real war--collateral damage. At no point in the game will you ever understand why you're doing what you're doing; you just do what you're told. Even the ending itself is a perfunctory congratulations screen, which drives home the point (or rather, the lack of one) even more. Unfortunately, this was all missed by the British tabloids, who excoriated Sensible for treating war like a game, focusing on its use of the red poppy as a logo, the poppy being a symbol of the dead Anglo-American soldiers of World War I. I believe that, on the contrary, Cannon Fodder was developed with respect and compassion for those soldiers and their families, World War I being the pre-eminent definition of a meaningless war.

Cannon Fodder does have its flaws, of course. One that pops up in all versions of the game is the fact that you have to press the move button while holding down the attack button in order to use grenades or rockets. In the middle of a firefight, it is very easy to accidentally throw a grenade in the direction that you wanted to move to. Another related problem, but one that I'm not sure is in every version of the game, is poor pathfinding. You have to direct your squad with a lot of micromanagement lest it get hung up on the surroundings. Sometimes the squad also stops paying attention to your move orders unless you wait or tell it to attack, which can be highly annoying. It also of course doesn't help that you can't actually use a mouse in the Mega Drive version. As for aesthetics, the music and sound aren't as good as in the original Amiga version or the PC version. The graphics are about the same quality (which is to say, nothing to write home about), but the Mega Drive version seems to have an issue possibly caused by weaker technology where things are not animated as fluidly as they could be, and everyone feels like they're walking in water.

Cannon Fodder for the Mega Drive certainly isn't the best version of the game to play. It wasn't even released in America; the only version worth noting that was was the PC version. However, the Mega Drive version (or the similar SNES version) are ironically easier to access through various legal or illegal means for most of the modern Internet-using population. And it doesn't hurt that you can use savestates for either of those versions. Apparently there will soon be a PSP version, though it's hard to say whether or not that will be released in America either, or even if it will be the same game; there was a version for the Game Boy Color released about a decade ago that had similar levels but a very different tone from the other versions. At any rate, Cannon Fodder is a fun game on any system, though I dare you not to feel sad and guilty when you finally lose Jools after so much effort trying to keep him alive.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/07/10

Game Release: Cannon Fodder (EU, 1994)