Amiga, gog.com, Sensible Software, Virgin Interactive

Cannon Fodder 2, Amiga

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Cannon Fodder 2 is for players who want more Cannon Fodder action, and simply did not get enough of its predecessor. Sadly, it’s not quite as good as the first game, so may cause an overdose…

Graphically Cannon Fodder 2 is quite lovely, and the same great gameplay is evident in this sequel, but somehow it’s missing something… It’s difficult to say what. Maybe discipline and focus. The seemingly endless fantasy-style levels are sometimes cleverly put together, but not always, and can get a bit boring after a while.

Cannon Fodder 2 – as I said earlier – is mostly for those who didn’t get enough from the first game. If you’ve played neither, I highly recommend the original Cannon Fodder over this.

Cannon Fodder 2 was developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1994.

More: Cannon Fodder 2 on Wikipedia
GOG: Cannon Fodder 2 on GOG.com

6 thoughts on “Cannon Fodder 2, Amiga”

  1. I highly recommend the book on Sensible Software if you’ve never read it. Aside from being a cracking read, it does reveal how troubled CF2’s development was. If I remember, it was meant to be much more focused on a plot around time travel, but a lot of it got stripped out and what was left didn’t make much sense.

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    2. Thinking more about it, it probably is a plot that is missing, but then again: the gameplay of Cannon Fodder doesn’t really lend itself to a dialogue, or text-based narrative, beyond the objective screen, so they probably found that trying to add a story didn’t work, so removed it.

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      1. I’ve just finished reading the book again. The impression I’m left with is Sensible Software were hitting a point where they were starting to overreach with their concepts for games, and were starting to lose their focus and discipline during development. Jon Hare pretty much states in the book he had little involvement in CF2, just sort of palming it off to the other developers while he was busy elsewhere (I think with SWOS, which to be fair was probably the better focus). On a technical level it’s good, but the actual presentation doesn’t really seem to know who its audience is meant to be. It kinda feels like one of the Amiga Power demo disks they did, but bloated out to a full game and past its novelty appeal.

        There were early plans for a book tie in to actually explain the plot, which I think in and of itself evidences problems with the approach as I’m not really sure it would’ve actually added anything. It wasn’t long after this that Sensi started cancelling projects because the concepts were running wilder and further than the development could catch up with, and I can’t help but wonder if CF2 hadn’t been wise enough to reuse the existing CF engine if it’d also never seen the light of day.

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      2. If I remember rightly, Stuart Campbell did all of the level design in Cannon Fodder 2. Stuart was a contributor to PC Zone during my time there (post Cannon Fodder 2), and if I’m not mistaken I think I gave him his first commission at Zone. Nice fella, good writer, a total pro – I can still remember Stuart quite well.

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      3. Yeah, that’s my understanding too. It seems to be that Stuart joined and was sort of left with Cannon Fodder 2, and somewhat unfairly gets a chunk of the bad rap as a result. The problem was more so he joined and was largely left in charge of an already developed series. The level design was good, but I think he would’ve be better served on a new project he could make his fresh stamp on. I didn’t realise he did bits for PC Zone!

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