Dark Reign: The Future of War

The Good
Nothing in particular. The graphics are bland and the story is decent at best.

The Bad
Quite a bit. First, the game moves to fast. It suffers from a serious speed issue. A lot of the units are stupid. Take the Water Contaminator.... PLEASE! (heh heh) It moves really slow,(for this game anyway) and is real expensive. It's able to make the water of any pool(that's what the places where you get you're water look like) unusable. Sounds great, huh?? WRONG!!!!!!! Since it's so slow, you can't just waltz it in and contaminate your enemies water supply, you have to be able to have enough protection to eliminate any enemy units and turrets that get in your way. So, if you have enough power to destroy all enemy forces and turrets, why not just get the water for yourself??? A.I. is nearly braindead. You get a big force of strong slow units and fast weak ones and tell them all to go to your enemies base and the fast ones will get there first and get blown up. The resource gathering trucks (RGT's for short) will crowd each other, get lost and generally get in the way. The shredder is another failed unit. It shreds infantry and does it well, but it is totally useless. Why?? Because the sniper, along with the majority of other tanks wipe out infantry nearly as easily. Infantry are the most pitiful units in the game. They're just fodder for nearly every other unit. Stealth is another useless part of the game. Units like the sniper and sabatouer can transform into trees and bushes(??) so as to blend in with their surroundings. Not only does it never work with the computer, but how many times would you be fooled by a moving bush or tree?? It's insanely tough. The first couple of levels are ok, but after level 3 or 4 it becomes ridiculously hard. You'll spend days on a single mission then give up in disgust. Finally, the sound "effects" could be recorded better by you making laser noises in a microphone and the music is just plain bad. In the end, this is just another poor rts game released in the pre age of empires period.

The Bottom Line
Go play Age of Empires instead.

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
Everything, including the game play, the missions, the instant action feature, the units, the buildings, the realism and the graphics. The storyline is good as well. I love stories about conflicts between different forces.

The Bad
I hate the construction kit because I can't write my own mission briefings or set the end conditions, and not being able to access the communications menu in a single player mission really pee's me off.

The Bottom Line
A definite must have. It's the best game you can get!