The Dreadnaught Factor

The Good
Make no mistake; this game is one amazing ride. I've played a lot of space games, and fought a lot of very big ships, but in twenty years I still haven't found one as tough -- nor as exciting -- as a Dreadnaught Factor Dreadnaught about halfway through difficulty level 6.

It's not just the awesome volume of fire these ships can put out. It's not the unnerving speed with which they approach their bombardment point. It's not the nasty little surprises that they didn't tell you about in the manual that show up on every single level. It's all of this together plus the sheer mind-blinding speed of things on-screen that will give your twitch reflex all it could ask for.

In addition to a twitch, the game also requires a player with a brain -- dreadnaughts are modeled in detail, and since there's no way on the higher difficulty levels to take out a ship in one pass, you have to carefully plan out exactly what you're going to do in each pass (take out the engines? Go for the main missile armament? Knock back the defensive grid? ) then go out and DO it, carefully adjusting your plan based on what happened in the previous pass.

This is also one of the few games of the genre where "run away to fight another day" makes sense -- you can abort a pass at any time, fairly easily, and knowing when and how to do that is one of the things that separates the skilled from the dead at the higher difficulty levels. You MUST abort passes, as staying too long simply gets you killed.

The Bad
There are 7 levels of difficulty in this version, ranging from "basic" to "you've got to be kidding". Unfortunately, even so there is no real "middle" range -- the difficulty jumps from "trivial" (levels 0-3) to "Nigh impossible" (Levels 4-7) in the blink of an eye.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, this game is rock -- and I do mean rock -- hard. How hard is it? Let this be an indication: In an era when most games gave you three lives, this game gave you TEN lives to start out with and FOUR extra lives for every dreadnaught destroyed. Why? Because the game designers figured that even the very very best players would still lose about four ships destroying a dreadnaught on the higher levels. And they were right. I don't care how good you are -- fly into range of a significant portion of the dreadnaught's battery, and even if your game control is hardwired into your brain, you have to be superhuman to survive for more than about three seconds. It is that tough.

Also, the graphics aren't terribly hot. Not that you'll notice. Anyone who spends a second or two critiquing the dreadnaught's color scheme will find themselves atomized by a crisscross of particles, lasers, and missiles. Perhaps that was intended ? :)

Finally, and most annoyingly, level 7 is near-impossible to complete. Not because of the difficulty, but simply because there are 100 dreadnaughts to kill. Given that it took me about 30 minutes to win level 5 (10 dreadnaughts), it will probably take 5 or so hours of uninterrupted play -- in the age before saved games -- to finish.

The Bottom Line
An eminently playable game that -- if you're a fan -- comes closest of any to the feel of Fred Saberhagen's book BERSERKER WARS, in which bands of courageous small fighters go up against nigh-invincible planet-busting dreadnaughts. Few games today will send you up against such a mothership more than once (at the very end), while Dreadnaught Factor does it again, and again, and again.