Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday Overview
The game is a science fiction role playing experience where players manage a team of six operatives for the New Earth Organization. This group is a resistance movement on a future Earth that has become subservient to the RAM superpower, which extracts the planet's resources from its base near Mercury.
Characters are created by selecting from various professions, including Warrior, Medic, and Engineer, and from several races such as Human, Martian, and Venusian. The narrative context involves the protagonist, Buck Rogers, a cryogenically preserved soldier from the past, awakening to this new political reality and aligning with the NEO cause.
Gameplay involves multiple navigation layers. Travel between planets occurs on a top down map of the solar system where space combat can occur. Upon landing, exploration shifts to a local map and then into first person for specific buildings or hostile zones. Turn based tactical combat is presented from an isometric viewpoint, with characters moved as icons across a battlefield.
The setting depicts a colonized solar system where former Earth colonies have shifted the balance of power. The player's party, as new NEO recruits, is trained and then deployed into this conflict. The game's mechanics and interface share similarities with other role playing games of its period, despite its futuristic theme.
