In the months between the original Cannon Fodder topping the charts and this sequel following it, some significant changes happened. Commodore’s CD32 console, released the previous September and essentially an Amiga + CD drive + controller – keyboard – mouse, failed to corner the market for CD games, and Commodore went bankrupt. There was no longer a commercial future in the UK’s favourite computer of the early ‘90s. There were, however, a lot of Amiga players remaining and interested in new games. Not all of them moved over to expensive PC alternatives, or wanted to go the console route which Sega’s Mega Drive was currently the leading representative of. So there was still an opportunity for Amiga developers, if one with a countdown clock loudly ticking away.
That context makes sense of everything about Cannon Fodder 2, which is good because there isn’t a lot of making sense of it otherwise. Running on exactly the same engine as Cannon Fodder, it looks almost precisely like it in most aspects. The user interface is the same, the plan text objectives that introduce each mission – KILL ALL ENEMY etc. – are the same. Your tiny fragile troops and their tiny fragile opponents are ultimately the same. The screen where new recruits line up to go to their measly deaths is the same… and not the same. A strange landscape in orange and pink, complete with alien and/or phallic buildings, takes the place of the green hills. Yet start the first levels and they take place somewhere that looks pretty similar to Cannon Fodder’s setting.
[screenshot from World of Stuart]
Barely a sequel, much of Cannon Fodder 2 reflects its speed of production, cutting corners to grab that fading opportunity on the Amiga while they still could. New locations are thrown in as a way of having something significant and new to point to, but they didn’t get time to put in place the alien abduction plot that was meant to tie them together. It feels less like a new game and more like the things they might have provided as examples if Sensible Software were releasing Cannon Fodder Maker.
One mirror of the circumstances of development is that newly acquired journalist-turned-level-designer Stuart Campbell has taken consideration of players’ own time pressures. Levels don’t have slow rivers to cross and don’t have the same sprawl in general. Instead, different options for movement and cover are densely packed in with some smart use of scenery. It gets the player into the game of working out the angles to approach and fire at enemies much quicker and in more detail.
How much that is a good or bad thing depends on what you were getting out of Cannon Fodder to begin with. If it was primarily the tactics and quick gunplay, then Cannon Fodder 2 executes that much better and with less faffing around (although the loading times are still exhausting). At the same time, the sense of creeping futility that allowed Cannon Fodder to have force as an anti-war experience, even while the player spends their time killing people, is diminished. More even than the lack of more new things, that makes Cannon Fodder 2 feel small and rushed in comparison.
Gallup Amiga chart, Amiga Format, February 1995
