Dark Reign 2

Dark Reign 2 rating

Homeworld

Homeworld rating

Dark Reign 2 Review

By Blackclaw

The orginal Dark Reign was a solid RTS that broke some new ground in unit AI, but it never really compared to my favorite RTS, Total Annihilation. Dark Reign 2 comes across to me the same way. It's a solid game that shows some innovation, but just doesn't quite make my favorite list of games.

Game Play

So I'm three or four missions into the JDA (Jovian Detention Authority) campaign and I'm pretty sure the lady at the control center has the hots  for me. Sweet voice, sense of humor, yep can't wait to get back to base.  Then she sends me out on an artifact hunt with no construction units and a woefully undersized force. We get predictably ambushed and mauled. Then  this lady, who was so sweet to me before, reads me the riot act, calls me incompetent, and dismisses me. I'm incompetent? I'm not the brillant  planner that send an outnumbered attack force into a cave with no means of  making new units. Yeah I know, there's a trick to getting through the mission. You play through it once, find out where the ambush points are  and deal with it accordingly. But I hate playing missions where you pretty much are doomed to fail the first time. I know it's not real life, but it's fun to pretend you actually are a battle commander. It ruins it when I'm beating the enemy because I have deja vu. If I wanted to play a puzzle game, I'd be playing Myst. And why do game companies seem to think it's fun to have some jerk commander, whose just as responsible for the mission failure as you are, chew you out. It's not enough that the player has just watched his forces get wiped out and now has to play the same annoying mission yet again, no... the player gets to be called names too. Well I paid for the game and I don't want to be called names. I want the idiot general who planned the crappy mission in front of me, kneeling, and trying to apologize for their incompetence while I play with their breathing patterns through a Darth Vader like force grip on their throat.

So anyway, instead of trudging through the boring mission  again I went to instant action, defected to the Sprawlers and pretended  that lady was in every JDA Command Center I blew up. I hate scripted  campaigns that force you to replay missions repeatedly until you discover the trick needed to win. Dark Reign 2 offers such a campaign. Use the campaign as a training lesson in how to control your units and then run to the instant action and multiplayer modes as quickly as possible. Those are  actually a lot of fun. I suggest looking at Earth 2140 if you're interested in a RTS campaign.

The sides are fairly well balanced, although not on a unit to unit basis. Inequalities are balanced out by taking into consideration cost and a side's total capability. It works out fairly well, although I think the  Sprawlers have a slight edge, but that could just be a reflection of my  playing style. Some of the units really shine, like the Skulk which is a  sniper extrodinare. The mobile artillery pieces for both sides are  excellent. Other units seem to be large expensive targets. I never have  figured out what a Sky Fortress can do that a squad of tanks can't do  faster, cheaper, and with less risk of casualties. Sky Fortresses are one  of the JDA's top end units but the cheapest anti-air Sprawler unit can  take one down easily. The rate of fire and movement of a Sky Fortress is pitiful. To use them successfully you must first send in units to take out any anti-air units. Once that's accomplished you'll find that that squad can usually finish off the enemy base before the Sky Fortresses arrive anyway so why build them? Any hardcore players that wish to fill me in on what I'm missing please feel free.

Air units in general tend to be on the slow side. Like many current RTS  games, the air units also like to simply hover above their target, trading shots one for one with the enemy. Total Annihilation is about the only RTS game that gets air units right. Bombers are suppose to get in quickly, hit their target, and then get away. In TA even the units that were designed to hover over the target (Brawlers and Rapiers) at least weave back and forth in an effort not to get hit. Dark Reign 2 air units apparently feel  no need for self-preservation.

The multiplayer aspect of the game is solid and offers several variations of game play. Humans can go against each other or against the  AI. Allies can exchange units and resources.

The interface feels slow and clunky. The game starts you out typically  facing a direction other than "North" so when you first start moving your  view around your scrolling doesn't take you in the direction you think  it's going to. You can orient yourself using the strange diamond shape map  display, but it's still difficult to figure out what direction you are  using and if your base loses power it's unavailable. Earth 2150 places a  big rotating compass in the upper left corner of the screen. It's a simple  solution that works well.

From my ranting you might think that I don't like the game, but that's not true. Dark Reign 2 is a solid RTS game and there's a lot of fun to be  had here. It's just that there are so many RTS games out there that it takes a lot to stand out. We saw in the original Dark Reign a lot of potential, but it was eclipsed by Total Annihilation and Starcraft. In Dark Reign 2 we see the same thing. Tremendous potential that doesn't quite come to fruition. And the game is eclipsed by the brillance of Earth 2150.

Customization

Dark Reign 2 comes with a  map editor, but it is unsupported and not the easiest thing to install. Use Windows Explorer to look at the Dark Reign 2 CD and look in the Editor directory for instructions on how to set up the editor. Dark Reign 2 doesn't offer much more in the way of customization, although serious  programmers in the community are working on mods for the game.

Graphics

Dark Reign 2 features some spectacular graphics. The units look good, although some folks have complained that they look a little too "cartoony" with their bright colors. I also prefer a bit of a more realistic look to  vehicles. It would have been nice to have some textures that really looked metallic. The vehicles would come off better if they looked a bit more worn and used like real tanks do.

Dark Reign 2's graphics really shine when it comes to terrain, lighting, and the ability to get a first person perspective on what is goin on. It is very easy to rotate your view from a top down perspective to a level one that makes you feel that you are literally standing on the  battlefield. A first person view is practically useless when it come to commanding your units, but it looks so good I always find myself going to  it so I can enjoy the action. It's one of the few things that I wish Earth 2150 did as well.

Community

The best way to get in touch with the Dark Reign 2 community is to head over to its forums area. Be  sure to go to the game's official homepage and get the latest patches and news.

Requirements

The stated requirements  for the game is a Pentium 2 233 with 64 MB. You'll really want to have a 3d graphics card in your computer to enjoy this game. Prepare to sacrifice  some serious hard drive space (550 MB with an additional 100 MB free for use as a Windows swap file). We tested the game on both AMD and Intel platforms with few problems.

Dark Reign 2 Ratings

Game play

7

Graphics

9

Single Player

7

Multi-player

7

Customization

6

Stability

9

Overall

7

Homeworld Review

By Blackclaw

Homeworld is the next step in real time strategy gaming.

The problem when taking "the next step" in any genre is that it might  be a step in the wrong direction. It is a hit or miss risk that many companies prefer to avoid, instead relying on safe cookie cutter sequels  to proven game formulas. Fortunately for gamers, Relic was willing to bet on a risk and it has proven to be a hit.

The "next step" that Relic offers us is real time strategy gaming in three dimensions . Now you have to not only worry about your enemy being  North, West, East, or South of you; but perhaps above or below you as well.

Game Play

There were some difficult  hurdles to overcome for Relic to make this three diminsional RTS work. Most importantly is the interface. How the heck are you suppose to select  and control ships that are moving in every possible direction? Believe it or not, Relic makes ship selection easy with a combination of a zoom-out and in-close views and a rotatable camera that locks onto the selected  ships. Number keys can be linked to combat groups you create for quick selection later. Attacking enemy vessels that are within visible range is also easy. Select the ships you want to attack with, rotate your view until you see the enemy and then right-click on his ships. Whether the  enemy is above you, level with you, or below you doesn't really affect the  difficulty of giving an attack order.

A frigate encounters a hostile fleet.

The enemy's position can have a significant tactical importance  however. Some classes of capital ships have most their firepower to their front and in all capital ships armor is strongest to the front so attacks  to the top, bottom, or rear of a capital ship can have the best results.

But what about movement over long distances or ordering attacks on enemy ships that are not within visable range? That can be a little  tricky, but I consider this a strong point of the game. You use a zoomed out view of the map called the "Sensors Management Screen" for moving long distances. This screen also provides other interesting information like "where is that guy whose trying to kill me?" The view this screen provides  can be rotated from the horizontal to the vertical. Movement is simply a  matter of drawing a line from your selected ships to where you want to go. Well, not so simply. Moving in the vertical plane can be a bit tricky and if you fail to rotate the view and check both the vertical and the horizontal planes your fleet can end up far off course. This can be an expensive mistake if you decided to move your fleet quickly with a hyperspace jump. It can be a fatal mistake if your re-enforcements end up  in a lonely sector of space instead of at the battle site. However, I like  the fact that long distance navigation isn't overly simplistic. This is  navigation through the deepness of space, it should require some thought. It becomes a point of pride when you can jump in your fleet exactly where  you wanted them to appear. The sight of your ships suddenly hypering into the attack at a perfect point of weakness will earn you the fear of your  enemies and the appreciation of your allies.

I do have some minor criticism about gameplay. The three ship types (fighters, corvettes, capital ships) were designed to provide a rock,  paper, scissors kind of tactical game play. Fighters can take on capital ships, corvettes take out fighters, and capital ships take out corvettes. They mix things up a bit by throwing in some exceptions which is all well and good except that one of the exceptions is the missile destroyer. Now  don't get me wrong, I love the missile destroyer. But this sucker almost  makes fighters and corvettes obsolete. It can chew through a formation of  twenty bombers in twenty seconds. Good use of tactics can make up for  this. It is possible to take out a missile destroyer with corvettes or fighters, but it takes skill and micromanagement. And if a second missile destroyer is guarding the first, well... life gets tough for the little ships. The best way to take out a missile destroyer is with another capital ship that is armed with some ion cannons. I love the capital ships  in this game. Fighters and corvettes have their place too (those ion  cannon armed ships are vulnerable to them so guard your missile destroyers with some fighters), but typically when it comes time to decide what to research you will choose fighters OR corvettes. You will ALWAYS want to  research capital ships in a mothership vs mothership game. I guess I just  wish fighters and corvettes we're a bit tougher or a bit cheaper.

An allied assault on a mothership.

I also wish that there was a game summary screen IN THE GAME. There is a great deal of statistics that are kept about a multiplayer match up, but  they are stored into a text file in the Sierra\Homeworld directory. (The  file will be named [last person's name who died] died.txt. Example: Hans  died.txt) Why this information isn't displayed in a victory or defeat  screen at the end of a match-up is beyond me.

But I'm picking on scratches in a diamond here. This is a great game.  It's an innovation that works. I've heard the complaint that the game is  too slow paced. This is a complaint by someone who hasn't tried a carrier  only game. A multiplayer variation in which fighters and bombers do rule  and quick strikes are the order of the day. As far as mothership verses  mothership goes, yes a successful attack does take longer to put together.  The early rush that so many folks complain about isn't really an option in  a mothership vs mothership game. (Check out my stance on rushing for more background.) If you want to take a handful of scouts over to attack an enemy mothership go ahead. Maybe the mothership will even notice, but I doubt it. You're going to need capital ships to take that sucker down and those require time to research and build. For folks who want faster pace games Relic offers many variations that speed up game play such as resource injections, all research completed, or the carrier vs carrier variation that I mentioned above. I've heard others complain that every  game tends to play out the same way. These folks need to stop playing against newbies. When first learning the game the easiest thing to do is  build a big force and fight a two diminsion war. It's a tactic that works  in any RTS against players just learning a game. A good RTS has intricate tactics that must be learned to become an advanced player. Starcraft and  Total Annihilation are good examples of this. It's possible to win by throwing large armies at the enemy, but once you start facing advanced players you need to learn how to use your units on a more tactical basis or your enemy will just chew you up. In Homeworld you need to learn to use  the three diminsional plane. You need to learn to seize resource pockets early on. You need to learn how to attack from above or below with a combination of units that put their strengths against your enemy fleet's weaknesses. I know it's disconcerting not to have a hill or a land feature  of some kind to grab and hold onto. But trust me, in most maps there are  key areas of space that are worth taking and holding onto, be it for resource denial, traffic interception, sensory information, or tactical advantage.

Homeworld offers a dramatic, well crafted, single player campaign with a great story line. I hear it's kinda on the short side. I haven't played  it much. But this is a prejudice I have against scripted campaigns. If you  fail, you have to play the same scenario over again and the second time there isn't anything to really discover about the story. The third time is just an attempt to get the campaign moving again. Anyway, I get distracted easily. What distracted me, as easily evidenced from the above paragraphs,  was the great game that can be found in multiplayer. Don't feel like  playing against other humans? No problem. Up to seven AI can go against  you. The AI difficulty is scalable. The lowest setting is perfect for  learning the game and the highest setting provides a tough game. Only the best players can take on all seven AI allied against them. When it's time  to play against humans connecting to a game is easy with an in-game interface provided. The hardest part is getting everyone else to agree on what game settings to use. I had a few dropped connections when entering a game, but over-all I had a good success rate. Lag would hit occasionally,  seemingly at random, slowing framerate to a crawl for a few seconds. Then it would be gone and all was right with the world again. It didn't seem to  hit during big battles like feared it would. Playing Homeworld on a LAN is  even better. No random lag. (Although slower computers on our network generated their own lag but I'll cover that in the Requirements section.) Allies can dock with each other's ships, share resources, and sensor information. I do wish they could repair each other's capital ships using  repair corvettes or support frigates, but alas this abilty was left out.

I will go back to the single player campaign. It really does tell a  good story. And the woman who speaks for the mothership has this voice that just haunts and compels you. But I have to fight some more battles in  multiplayer before I'll get back to getting her and those people in the ship home.

Graphics

Space. It's black. It's empty. In most cases it's not much to look at. That's why Relic decided to have all of its battles take place near gorgeous colored nebulas with resource  clouds that drape some maps like lace. The ships are beautiful. Battles  are awe inspiring moments of twisting ships, engine trails, and brillant bursts of light from ion cannons. The entire thing looks like something  from an episode of Babalyon 5. When you first start playing the game, it's  not uncommon to forget to do anything and just sit there and stare at the beauty of the screen like a drooling idiot. But then an enemy fleet will emerge before you from the darkness, like some accursed nightmare that you  knew would return from the night before. Fighters trail fire and tumble to  destruction in their death throes. The sight of a ship being pierced by an  ion cannon and being reduced to a ball of plasma is something you won't easily forget.

The 1.04 patch even lets you get a rough "in ship" view. Just launch  Homeworld with a shortcut that has this target:  C:\Sierra\Homeworld\homeworld.exe /pilotview (assuming C:/Sierra/Homeworld  is the appropriate directory.) Then while in the game focus on a single ship and hit the Q key. Watching from a fighter's perspective can provide  a particularly wild ride. Just hit Q again to go back to your normal view.

My only complaint is that dying capital ships don't fragment. Small  ship deaths are nearly perfect. But it would be nice to see some of the larger ships break up into pieces. One of the truly unnerving sights in  Freespace and Freespace 2 are the floating remains of ships' hulls slowly  turning in the darkness. These ghosts tell you of battles past and it  would add an erie touch to be traveling through a heavily fought for area  and see the remains of previous battles. Of course such things put added strain on a computer's resources so trade offs are understandable.

Overkill? We call it getting the job done.

Customization

As mentioned in several  places above, Homeworld offers a lot of choices when setting up a game. You can skirmish against the computer, ally with a friend and play against multiple AI, play bounty hunter and get resources only when you get a kill, skip resource gathering all together... There are a lot of ways to play this game. A map editor ships with the game, but it's more  complicated than what the average user is going to want to mess with. It's existence does insure however a steady supply of maps from various  Homeworld fan sites. The game also allows you to customize the colors on  your ships, but there's not a lot of variation that you can achieve.

Several folks have begun to create various mods of Homeworld which is a  good sign for the continued replay value and lifespan of this great game.

Community

Homeworld has a big, thriving, rabid community. Most of the players seem to be somewhat insane  and if you peruse through the Relic Forums you'll see what I mean. Pax, over at Relic News is one of the  craziest so be sure to visit his site as his news and commentary never  fails to be entertaining. The folks over at Homeworld Fleet Command  are also full of strange and bizzare information. Some of it is even about  Homeworld so be sure to check them out.

Requirements

The box states that you'll need a Pentium II 233 with 32 megs. I wouldn't try it with anything less than 64 megs. We ran it on an AMD K6 233 with a Voodoo 2 and 64 megs of memory. We did suffer the occasional slow down in some of the larger battles but generally had no trouble once we turned the background off and made sure that unit caps were left on. Speaking of unit caps.. Homeworld has the wierdest cap limits I've ever encountered. The cap limits are  never simply a set limit of the number of ships you can build. They seem based on the number of players involved, what you build, the day of the week, and what phase the moon is in. Occasionally the build limits force you to alter your plans unexpectantly because you don't know you're approaching the limit until it's been reached. The limits don't usually get in my way, but it sure would be nice to know what they are ahead of  time. If you have an uber-machine you can turn them off and build as many  ships as your foolish opponent will let you get away with. Anyway back to the requirements. We also ran the game on a Pentium II 300 laptop with 128  megs of memory and no 3d video card. It worked just fine. On the Pentium  III 600 with 128 megs and a TNT 2 Ultra we turned all the graphic options  to maximum and turned the unit limits off. Ran great. I suppose if we let  the 7 AI build with researching turned off and resource injections turned  on with some ridiculous number we would reach a point where any computer  would get bogged down, so I advise against doing that unless you're  feeling sadistic. And if one of you out there with an AMD Athlon 733 is  feeling sadistic, let me know what it took to slow your machine down.

Homeworld Ratings

Game play

9

Graphics

9

Single Player

9

Multi-player

9

Customization

7

Stability

9

Overall

9