Drone Sector can’t escape the horrors of war
Drone Sector took the concept behind that AC-130 Call of Duty mission and turned it into an entire game. You command a drone that is essentially an AC-130, with exactly the same weapons and combat tactics of circling the battlefield and firing from relative safety.
There’s a mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare where you are the gunner in an AC-130, and you rain down hell on enemy soldiers from 7,000 feet in the air. It’s fun because you’re untouchable in a marvel of military engineering, but it’s also horrifying because it’s so cold and detached. This was back when Call of Duty had a vague anti-war message struggling under the hoo-rah bravado: the usual cinematic music was replaced with the drone of the AC-130s propellers, the macho battle chatter was replaced with an apathetic crewman coolly describing what targets were available and whether you hit them or not, and the thermal camera reduced the screen to two colours.
That mission stuck with me because it was a horrifying peek into true modern combat, an asymmetric shooting gallery where one side can massacre the other without ever having to think about the humanity of the little white blobs on the screen. You felt powerful, but you also felt like a monster.
Drone Sector took the concept behind that Call of Duty mission and turned it into an entire game. You command a drone that is essentially an AC-130, with exactly the same weapons and combat tactics of circling the battlefield and firing from relative safety. You take on randomly generated missions that ask you to capture some intel and destroy certain enemy infrastructure, and then you command a few squads of units on the ground while providing covering fire with different ammunition types.
The feeling of absolute power is present and correct, but the haunting cold detachment is not. Instead of droning propellers, there’s a bombastic rock soundtrack that builds to a crescendo as you fire your cannons into enemy bases. Whenever you kill an enemy, you’re rewarded with a little red skull popping up in the middle of the screen. This isn’t a game that forces you to think about the horrors of war; in fact, it goes pretty far in the opposite direction.
