What Dark Reign adds to this mix is a wild variety of units and structures, including the aforementioned hostage takers and suicide bombers, as well as a dimensional portal, tanks that look and act like giant circular saw blades, television towers that give your artillery a sweeping view of the map, and the dessicator -- a weapon which sucks the water out of everything in its path.
Additionally, Dark Reign allows you to set a series of waypoints for your troops, tweak how a given unit or platoon responds to a threat, change the aggressiveness of various units, order a trapped vehicle to self-destruct, and pack up your base onto giant treads and move to a nicer neighborhood.
That's all very cool, and some of it is truly innovative. The difficulty we had with the game though was threefold:. Even when the game is slowed down, the behavior of the "fog of war" effect in the game makes it very hard to defend against an attack until it's right in your base.
The sides are distinctly unbalanced. The Imperium side lacks the same sort of firepower that the Freedom Guard has, and thus it is very difficult to win a battle with Imperium forces in a head-to-head fight the Imperium favors sneakier tactics which are not all that much fun in a slugfest type of game. Dark Reign employs the standard mouse-driven commands for building, setting paths for your troops, etc.
Truth be told, though, despite all the fancy possibilities, there is really very little opportunity to use most of these functions due to the speed of the game and the simple nature of RTS games in general.
What seems to have happened here is that Auran actually listened to all the ideas that gamers had for improving the genre and tried to incorporate all of them. And while games like Civilization and Master of Orion benefited a great deal from the likes of saboteurs, spies, etc. Dark Reign uses a very nice SVGA graphics engine that is particularly effective in rendering landscape, vegetation, and explosions, all of which adds a much more realistic feeling to the environment -- there is no sense here that the graphics are tacked on or that the landscape and terrain was an afterthought.
In fact, the hills, valleys, rivers and ridges all affect the speed and effectiveness of your units -- a gentle rise will slow but not impede your armored units, while a higher ridge will force your tanks to go around while your infantry can still climb over often resulting in an unintended splitting of your forces and necessitating a bit of forethought before assaulting an enemy on high ground. Required: U.
Dark Reign is a definite contender in this fall's RTS sweepstakes, but in the end it is outclassed by the likes of Total Annihilation and Age of Empires -- a year ago it would have shattered sales records, but the competition is that much better this year, and while Dark Reign is a solid game and will undoubtedly end up being a favorite of many , in my opinion it has enough liabilities to preclude it from rising to the top of the genre.
It is, however, certainly worth a look, and worth buying if you're a fan of real-time strategy, especially of the sci-fi flavor. Overall, Dark Reign rates an The mission selection system is really nice, but hey, did we buy this game to play war or select missions? The most noticeable aspect of the game sadly enough was the music. It was surprisingly good; probably the best I've ever heard from this type of game, and it never got boring or annoying.
The sounds were decent, but definitely could have been better. They were too many generic laser sounds that got repetitive after a while.
You use your mouse to select units and scroll along the map, etc. The one thing they did really improve on is the plot. In the manual there is a plot running nine pages long; the game, however, does a really bad job developing it in-between missions. The briefings are just text-based explanations of what you have to do.
No movies, voices, visual aids, plot development, etc. It's as if they were separated and have nothing to do with one another. This game boasts of "superior artificial intelligence" that "acts as unpredictably as a human. I wouldn't take what they say too seriously, I found the computer to be very predictable just like its predecessors. On the other hand, the computer is much better player than previous real-time strategy games, which makes up for that predictability.
While we're on the subject of effects, you've probably noticed from the screenshots that DR2 is actually a great looking game. Detail on the buildings and units could be better, but the landscapes are extremely detailed and cover such diverse landmarks as waterfalls, rivers, trees, reflective water and majestic cityscapes. There's even a day and night cycle. When a game's strongest point is its two campaigns, you know you're in serious trouble. Sure, it's nice to know you can play through 20 missions from two different perspectives, but it's hardly the pinnacle of entertainment and let's face it - it's something that only the worst RTS's seem to do Pandemic appears to have gone out of its way to make DR2 as crappy as possible, and for the life of us we don't know why.
Dark Reign had its critics but at least it was novel for the time. There's sure to be Dark Reign fans out there who'll pretend this review doesn't exist. Fine - go and buy it, but trust us, you'll regret it for the rest of your lives Well, the next fortnight maybe. While completing the highly-rated Battlezone II, developers Pandemic have been simultaneously working on another sequel, the follow-up to the war-based RTS of choice for many.
Dark Reign 2 is claiming to be the first true 3D RTS game, and is set against the backdrop of the war between the powerful Jovian Detention Authority and the upstart Sprawlcrs, thus providing a prequel to the conflict between the Imperium and Freedom Guard featured in the original. Boasting an all-new game engine, Dark Reign 2 will introduce new strategic elements, such as day and night missions, with darkness opening up a whole different world of pain.
With full 3D terrain, maps become living worlds and can be used to your advantage. Troops can be hidden under trees, for instance, and artillery positioned on high ground to control the passes to your base.
It certainly looks impressive, and we sincerely hope they don't cock it up. Browse games Game Portals. Dark Reign 2. Install Game. Click the "Install Game" button to initiate the file download and get compact download launcher.
Locate the executable file in your local folder and begin the launcher to install your desired game.
0コメント