Defcon - Hooray for independent developers!
I've been playing Defcon for a few days now. This is an excellent game, which was produced on a small budget by a very small developer in the UK. It's a rather pure RTS, playable by 1 to 6 players over LAN or Internet. As soon as the spare, green vector model of the Earth appeared on menu, I felt I had been returned to the golden age of UK game development.
Not so long ago, games from the UK were well known for having clean iconic graphics and honed game designs. Prime examples are Wipeout 3, Walker, Shadow of the Beast (Amiga version) and Uridium. Three of these were published by Psygnosis, but they were all developed by different companies. I can think of a few examples from the PS2 era as well, such as BLACK and XG3, but these types of games seemed more common before the UK development scene started to run aground in recent years. An example of the problem is Burnout Revenge. Whereas Burnout 2 had the honed design of a classic British game, EA had taken over Criterion by then, and Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge muddied the water. BLACK seemed to survive the transition, most of its development having been done before the takeover.
I personally like these old-style British games immensely, so I was excited to see if Defcon would live up to its menu screen; and it did, in a big way. The graphic style is consistent throughout, done in spare vector graphics. The interface is well done, with just a few rough edges in terms of usablilty here and there; little problems like when you go to mouse-scroll southeast, often you catch the Territories button for a frame or two. That lights up all the territories in their player's colors; that looks a little weird for just a frame. It took me a little while to figure out where the flashing was coming from. But these are small details, especially considering the overall quality of the game experience and the price of the game (10 GBP, 12.50 Euro, 17.50 USD).
The game design is well-focused. Even though it's an RTS, there are no production elements. A player's units are all given at the start, and placed during the first few minutes of the game. No new units become available. This means that victory depends upon tactics, rather than honing resource and production skills. I'm not dead-set against having to learn a clean build order in games like Starcraft and Warcraft III, but that aspect is by no means necessary for game to work well. There are 9 unit types, and these are identical for all factions. While having 4 unique sets of units (as in Warcraft III) is very cool, there is something to be said for keeping a game pure as well. The units are carefully thought out, and all serve a unique purpose.
Much thought has gone into making the game playable by people with a variety of tastes. There are lots of options for customizing the game. The victory conditions can be altered, players can choose their territories or have them selected at random all players may receive the same set of units, or they may be bought with a credit system, etc. Game speed is always important in an RTS, and this one has dealt with that issue in a clever manner. There are four game speeds: real-time, 5x, 10x, and 20x. The default setting allows each player to select a speed at anytime, and the game runs at the slowest selected speed. So when there isn't much going on, time whizzes by; then when a player needs to give a cluster of orders, they can slow down time until they're done. But to prevent a single player from forcing the game to a crawl the whole time, the server can be set to require 5x as the minimum speed. This is just a sampling of the options, but they illustrate the though that the designers have put into the game's design.
The sound is spare, but perfectly suited to the game. Bare, haunting music is mixed with quiet, minimal interface sounds. The loudest sounds are the klaxons, but even they sound muted, though sinister. The AI performs at an acceptable level. He's not great in a 1v1 fight, but in a 3-humans-vs-3-CPU game, he does quite well.
Now, about its subject matter: Global Thermonuclear War. I've seen this handled in several ways. The Nuclear War card game took a very comical approach, with silly drawings and a light-hearted rule book (the owner of the game always goes first). Computer War on the Atari 8-bit computers took an overbearing, insistent tone. The moment it starts, it blares overdramatic music at you; and the game is a tense, fraught experience.
Defcon, however, is extremely subdued and quiet. The most obtrusive sounds are the klaxons, one for when the defcon level changes, and one signaling a player's first nuclear launch. But as stated before, even these are subdued in comparison to Computer War's blaring buzzers. What they lack in volume, they make up for in creepiness. When Washington, DC gets hit, it's merely accompanied by plain white text, "Washington hit 3.1 Million Dead," and a muffled explosion. The graphic for the explosion is just a shaded white circle that gets smaller with time. Combined with the haunting background music, this game makes for a disquieting experience.
The point system is simple: score two points for each million you kill, and lose one point for each million of your own people that you fail to protect. Since the victory condition rewards death more than life, I often find myself entirely ignoring military targets and just focusing on nuking as many cities as I possibly can. During the final stages of the game, I peruse the map looking for a last few unprotected millions to destroy for another couple of points. While I do this, I feel a slight twinge of guilt. With hundreds of megatons of detonated nuclear warheads, the Earth ruined, and more than 50% of the world's urban populations decimated (I know, that's not a proper use of the word "decimated"), why am I trying to kill another few hundred thousand? Because I must win, and I must win by the largest margin possible. But in 95% of the games I've played, nobody truly won, except as narrowly defined by the game's rules. But considering the ensuing nuclear winter, nobody wins.
Rating 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.
Notes:
Available for PC. At time of writing, Mac and Linux versions are in the works.
Not so long ago, games from the UK were well known for having clean iconic graphics and honed game designs. Prime examples are Wipeout 3, Walker, Shadow of the Beast (Amiga version) and Uridium. Three of these were published by Psygnosis, but they were all developed by different companies. I can think of a few examples from the PS2 era as well, such as BLACK and XG3, but these types of games seemed more common before the UK development scene started to run aground in recent years. An example of the problem is Burnout Revenge. Whereas Burnout 2 had the honed design of a classic British game, EA had taken over Criterion by then, and Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge muddied the water. BLACK seemed to survive the transition, most of its development having been done before the takeover.
I personally like these old-style British games immensely, so I was excited to see if Defcon would live up to its menu screen; and it did, in a big way. The graphic style is consistent throughout, done in spare vector graphics. The interface is well done, with just a few rough edges in terms of usablilty here and there; little problems like when you go to mouse-scroll southeast, often you catch the Territories button for a frame or two. That lights up all the territories in their player's colors; that looks a little weird for just a frame. It took me a little while to figure out where the flashing was coming from. But these are small details, especially considering the overall quality of the game experience and the price of the game (10 GBP, 12.50 Euro, 17.50 USD).
The game design is well-focused. Even though it's an RTS, there are no production elements. A player's units are all given at the start, and placed during the first few minutes of the game. No new units become available. This means that victory depends upon tactics, rather than honing resource and production skills. I'm not dead-set against having to learn a clean build order in games like Starcraft and Warcraft III, but that aspect is by no means necessary for game to work well. There are 9 unit types, and these are identical for all factions. While having 4 unique sets of units (as in Warcraft III) is very cool, there is something to be said for keeping a game pure as well. The units are carefully thought out, and all serve a unique purpose.
Much thought has gone into making the game playable by people with a variety of tastes. There are lots of options for customizing the game. The victory conditions can be altered, players can choose their territories or have them selected at random all players may receive the same set of units, or they may be bought with a credit system, etc. Game speed is always important in an RTS, and this one has dealt with that issue in a clever manner. There are four game speeds: real-time, 5x, 10x, and 20x. The default setting allows each player to select a speed at anytime, and the game runs at the slowest selected speed. So when there isn't much going on, time whizzes by; then when a player needs to give a cluster of orders, they can slow down time until they're done. But to prevent a single player from forcing the game to a crawl the whole time, the server can be set to require 5x as the minimum speed. This is just a sampling of the options, but they illustrate the though that the designers have put into the game's design.
The sound is spare, but perfectly suited to the game. Bare, haunting music is mixed with quiet, minimal interface sounds. The loudest sounds are the klaxons, but even they sound muted, though sinister. The AI performs at an acceptable level. He's not great in a 1v1 fight, but in a 3-humans-vs-3-CPU game, he does quite well.
Now, about its subject matter: Global Thermonuclear War. I've seen this handled in several ways. The Nuclear War card game took a very comical approach, with silly drawings and a light-hearted rule book (the owner of the game always goes first). Computer War on the Atari 8-bit computers took an overbearing, insistent tone. The moment it starts, it blares overdramatic music at you; and the game is a tense, fraught experience.
Defcon, however, is extremely subdued and quiet. The most obtrusive sounds are the klaxons, one for when the defcon level changes, and one signaling a player's first nuclear launch. But as stated before, even these are subdued in comparison to Computer War's blaring buzzers. What they lack in volume, they make up for in creepiness. When Washington, DC gets hit, it's merely accompanied by plain white text, "Washington hit 3.1 Million Dead," and a muffled explosion. The graphic for the explosion is just a shaded white circle that gets smaller with time. Combined with the haunting background music, this game makes for a disquieting experience.
The point system is simple: score two points for each million you kill, and lose one point for each million of your own people that you fail to protect. Since the victory condition rewards death more than life, I often find myself entirely ignoring military targets and just focusing on nuking as many cities as I possibly can. During the final stages of the game, I peruse the map looking for a last few unprotected millions to destroy for another couple of points. While I do this, I feel a slight twinge of guilt. With hundreds of megatons of detonated nuclear warheads, the Earth ruined, and more than 50% of the world's urban populations decimated (I know, that's not a proper use of the word "decimated"), why am I trying to kill another few hundred thousand? Because I must win, and I must win by the largest margin possible. But in 95% of the games I've played, nobody truly won, except as narrowly defined by the game's rules. But considering the ensuing nuclear winter, nobody wins.
Rating 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended.
Notes:
Available for PC. At time of writing, Mac and Linux versions are in the works.
posted by Almo at 5:37 AM
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