Dark Reign: The Future of War

The Good
You can see why even non-RTS fans like myself were interested in Dark Reign (DR) before its release, as it had plenty of good things going for it. There is a creative mixture of units for the two sides, and yet the player certainly isn't overwhelmed either. This means DR avoids the Total Annihilation (TA) syndrome, in which you have a zillion unit types to keep up with, even though many of them are of dubious value. Graphics are clean and colorful, and the soundtrack (music and FX) is well done. The Instant Action mode is pretty darn good, and there is an extremely flexible map/scenario editor thrown in as well.

As far as innovations go, DR introduced some good new ideas to the RTS genre. An advanced waypoint system, build queues, and different AI settings for your units added much-needed strategic depth and user-friendliness. And even though DR isn't true 3D like TA, it still attempted to add realism to tactical battles by implementing a system of terrain elevation.


The Bad
And yet, even with all of this technical prowess, DR managed to be a terrible GAME. It's almost as if Auran created the game engine and then Activision had no clue what to do with it, so they just threw something together real quick and shipped DR out the door with fingers crossed. Granted, that seemed to work for them at the time. Perhaps because they hadn't gotten a hold of TA or Age of Empires yet, reviewers generally gave this game glowing reviews that completely ignored DR's many significant shortcomings.

There are only two sides. Ok there is a third at the end, but it is nothing more than the other two combined. How's that for lame? Speaking of lame, this game has an allegedly "high-concept" time-travel sci-fi plot that is worse than the worst paperback novel or Star Trek: Voyager episode you ever had the misfortune to come across. Maybe I would have bought into it a tiny bit if they had bothered to put the story into the game with something beyond little pre-scenario text briefings. That's right--there are no C&C-style campaign videos, only a few sentences for your reading displeasure. Although there IS an extremely annoying voiceover guy doing his best bad "Full Metal Jacket" impression for the tutorial. No wait, it gets better: If you don't respond to the drill sergeant's commands immediately, he yells at you and the tutorial ends, forcing you to start over. Hilarious!

The campaigns themselves are every bit as uninspired as the plot. Yes there is an editor, but I shouldn't have to make my own game! There are basically no bodies of water in the maps, so there is no naval or amphibious warfare. Resource harvesters need constant babysitting, as they get hung up on buildings and each other with remarkable ease. Worst of all, DR is TOO DAMN FAST. The game speed defaults to a very fast pace, and the firing rate for weapons is so rapid that even cranking down the game speed won't fix the pacing problem. DR is the ultimate tank rush game, and so all of those cool tactical innovations mentioned above will go unused because it's just as fruitful to simply run around as fast as possible, blowing stuff up.

The pacing sinks multiplayer, too, since the lamebrains you meet online will use the default speed setting without fail. Not that you could enjoy multiplayer even if it did work. The online community is as unpolished as it is unintelligent; DR players were, in my experience, the most vulgar and rude people I ever met. To top it off, the few people I came across who weren't complete sociopaths seemed to speak English only as a second language (not that the native speakers spoke English very well themselves).


The Bottom Line
As a bargain bin pickup, you might find DR moderately amusing for its single-player Instant Action mode, or if you like to tinker with powerful game editors. Just don't expect much.

The Good
I liked nothing about this game.

No really, I mean that.

The Bad
Just about everything.

To start with the whole game is simply a me-too rip-off of all the other RTS games flooding the market back then. With a the exception of a few basic changes, this game was utterly devoid of any sort of novelty or originality. Sure, it had a few more "modes" for its various units to let them explore (or what have you), but that's it, that's all they could add to the RTS scene. Their vaunted "re-darkening" map (whatever they called it, "the shroud" or something) was already a feature of everything other than Red Alert.

The graphics stank, there's no other way to put it. The scale was off so you had all of these tiny little vehicles running around and they were so small they tended to be difficult to grab. The color palette was something a kid might enjoy, all primaries and bright contrasts, it was enough to make you ill. Even the pictures themselves were childish, little orange dune-buggies were the main weapon of the "good guys", while the bad guys had bug-like blobs for tanks that shot purple circles - nothing at all like Red Alert or the others of the era where they might have hired a (gasp) graphic artist.

The UI was even worse. Getting the game set up and selecting missions was a series of selections from bizarre "menus" that were largely indecipherable. I don't know what they were thinking - I suppose it was supposed to be like some alien control panel, but why would I want to use that?

And once you're into the game? Well, one look at the way that your craft can't navigate from point a to b was enough for me. Once I watched one of my stupid dune buggies drive around and around a single tree while attempting to figure out how to shoot at a soldier. Eventually after circling it maybe 10 times, the soldier actually managed to plink it to death. Uggg.

Combat consisted of vehicles sitting there shinning lights on each other while making "phew phew" sounds that I could do better with my mouth. Battles were just plain boring.

Oh, but they were fast. They sold this as a feature, but what it really meant is that you had no chance of actually managing your resources in any reasonable fashion. The buggies would go FLYING across the map, then smack into a tank and be killed with flying pink-circles before you could grab the tiny bright orange icon. Urrrg.

The resource collection consisted of shipping WATER off-planet for money. That's right, WATER. Let me tell you, if water is so expensive that you can sell a tank of it for a tank (heh), there's no way anyone in the universe can afford a war. It's just stupid. Water?! Duh!

They couldn't even take the time to write a story. I watched the intro twice, and still had no real idea what the heck it was saying. The grammar was terrible, and I couldn't find a thread of a plot in there. Something about a scientist, rebels, scientist again, then you start shooting. Thanks!

The Bottom Line
Uggg. Companies have gone bankrupt for less.

The Good
RTS stands for 'Real Time Strategy'. When RTSes evolved from Red Alert and Warcraft 2, they tried to 'improve' the genre by adding more 'strategy', meaning more units, upgrades, buildings, etc. Real time strategy games eventually became lopsided, with all these strategy chunks but the real time element became slow. The fast paced action of Red Alert and Warcraft 2 would get bogged down in ridiculous (and meaningless) strategy layers such as Tiberian Sun and even Warcraft 3. When PCGAMER came to review this game, they gave it 94% due to the sheer addictive multiplayer capacity it has (which, at the time, laughably infuriated Total Annihilation fans with their 86% rating).

-Fast Paced Action-

Dark Reign is a very fast paced game which throws a lot of people off. Those who hated 'tank rushes' or 'grunt rushes' hated this game because IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO TURTLE. And unlike games like Age of Empires or Starcraft, having the upper units didn't mean squat as they could easily die as well. No game could ever be solidly won by just making high level units (which is how most Starcraft and Warcraft 3 multiplayer games act). Every multiplayer game was like an adrenaline rush because combat went very very fast. Little 13 year olds despised this title because they couldn't simply make a bunch of units, move them back and forth around the enemy, without major casualties. To illustrate how fast this game was, imagine Starcraft that is ten times faster on the highest speed.

-Line of Sight Tactics-

Strategy revolved around line-of-sight, which was a stupendous improvement over Warcraft 2's fog-of-war and hasn't been equaled in RTS yet. There are many weapons in this game, such as the Rift Creator (the Imperium's expensive and top leveled weapon that creates seemingly blackholes) or artillery (whose range is practically half the map), which are long range but require line of sight to fire. You would have other units whose only purpose would be to provide line of sight (Imperium had a recon drone that was inexpensive, would fly around. Freedom Guard had a scout infantry which would morph into surrounding terrain, so if the enemy found himself being artilleried, he would often find an enemy tree running around!). Camera towers were inexpensive low-hitpoints structures which would provide Line of Sight (if built on higher elevation, they would provide even more). This is why the game has more tactics than Warcraft 3 or Age of Empires 2 combined.

-Terrain-

Dark Reign was the first RTS to effectively combine terrain with strategy. Hovering units could go over water but could not go over steap rocks (so hovertanks often would surprise the enemy-base-on-a-hill by slipping through rivers). Infantry and other 'foot' units could only reach the upper elevation.

-Cashflow, not Income-

The resource of water for Dark Reign was great. Water would be 'shipped' away. Each water spot was inexaustible. However, they could be 'overmined' and would have to fill up again. Unlike all other RTS games where most players 'starve' their opponents, the game focused on gathering cashflow of multiple water resources. This kept the action very fast and furious.

-Unit AI-

The unit ai in Dark Reign remains unsurpassed. For your units, you can assign them properties. My favorite thing to do was my a lot of Freedom Guard Sky bikes which are cheap and very light damaging units. I would assign their ai to be tolerate low amount of damage before they would break off to repair. I gave them a very low aggressive rating (meaning they won't pursue units). Then I gave them the command 'Harass'. OMG. Imagine twenty little flying ships, each taking a seperate path, which find enemy somewhere, attack it, reload or find enemy, if it gets hit once, repair and repeat. What would occur is that the enemy was driven psychologically nuts with all these little ships 'pecking' at him here and there. This tactic bought me much time as it always put my enemies on the defensive and made them invest heavily in anti-air buildings (while I invested in ground based units). Also, I could set up extensive waypoint systems with other units which would consantly guard a region or go in loops hitting the enemy base, return to repair, hit enemy base, repeat. Only in Dark Reign could I pull off fun stunts like that. The unit ai has not been matched yet in RTS and with the sad state of 3d pathfinding in games now, it probably never will.

-Music-

The music is very good. It has redbook audio so you can put it in your cd player and play.

-Editor-

Featured a very nice, very easy to use editor. I played many many games with a professor from the University of Texas on a HUGE map that was geographically identical to North America. With additonal players, the game was a riot. Tank action was always heavy in Kansas and the midwest. Florida was vulnerable to hovertanks slipping on the water. The mountainous region bases had heaviest infantry and turret action. Nothing like being able to say to your ally, "You attack his Texas base while I draw attention with his armies in the Dakotas."

The Bad
-Graphics-

Sid Meir was asked why he didn't put in 'future technology' in his civilization game. He said, "Because the player cannot associate with it." Games such as Command and Conquer had people associating with tanks and missile launchers. Warcraft had celtic fantasyland. Starcraft was full of sci-fi cliches (Zerg from Aliens or from the aliens in Starship Troopers, Protoss being like the 'Jedi' in Star Wars). Age of Empires associates with history. But poor Dark Reign never succeeded as a game universe because no one can associate with a tank that looks like a beetle that shoots purple plasma.

-Single Player-

The single player in this game really isn't too much fun. What is interesting is how the single player campaign was designed, chiefly you being tested with 'historical battles' and you choose either the Freedom Guard side or the Imperium side, so if you are stuck you could choose the other side. But this 'vagueness' meant little story.

-Annoying Scouts-

If you combined morphed scouts (which would be looking like trees) with the phase transport, you could have LOS anywhere and not have the enemy stop you. Once the artillery shells started to fall, the player would search manically for enemy trees which was very frustrating. An option to be have a unit 'snif out' scouts or to be able destroy trees would have solved this.

The Bottom Line
This is the most under-rated RTS classic. If you play this, be sure you aren't expecting 'big graphics' because they aren't here. Also, play multiplayer with a friend. Multiplayer is what makes this game shin and what gave it such high gaming press reviews.This game still is fun and I still play it to this day. It has achieved a type of cult status for RTS players who love fast paced gameplay.