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Preys-World - DEFCON

Tuesday 3rd of October, 2006 - 00:55:23 GMT

"What's that sound?". "It means there's been a nuclear weapon launched" I said, pointing at the radioactive symbol that had appeared off the eastern coast of South America, "the submarines must have got past your carriers". "What do I do?". "Not much you can do really, the subs are too far out, your bombers would never get there in time". The green diamond representing a city was suddenly obscured by a white circle, accompanied by the message "SAO PAOLO HIT, 9.4 MILLION DEAD".

A half a dozen other coastal cities met a similar fate in the minutes that followed, the red missiles arching their way towards their targets, cruising past the batteries, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the attack. "Well that's it then, over 30 million dead, there's no way I can win now". "Don't be daft, nobody wins at this game, all you can hope for is that you take everyone else out with you". "So my next move?". "RETALIATE". The last war of mankind continued for another 2 hours, 100s of millions more died, but there was no remorse. On the Big Board the lives of your enemies are worth twice that of your brothers.

Would you like to play a game?

DEFCON comes from Introversion, a small company with a flair for creating games that are unmistakably theirs. You could say I'm a fan. A typical Introversion game is addictive, imbued with retro-type qualities, and with a visual style all it's own. DEFCON happily doesn't dispense with that trend.

Unlike their previous games DEFCON isn't a mishmash of several genres, it's a bona-fide real-time strategy game, which worried me somewhat when I first heard about it. This was partly because Darwinia - Introversion's previous game - sat pretty much by itself, there was nothing you could compare it to because it was a mix of so may different things. So I wondered whether a game made by an independent studio with just 10 employees could stand out in a market that's already fairly well stocked. The other reason this worried me was because despite playing PC games for many years the RTS is one genre that I've never been able to crack, so have Introversion managed to cater to simpletons like me who eschew strategic thinking in favour of quick reflexes and accuracy?

The answer to both of those questions is yes, the boys done good, DEFCON is a very good game. And the concept is simple - kill as many people as possible in an all-out nuclear confrontation with up to 5 other people. It's mutual assured destruction and everybody dies, 1 million people equals 1 point. Brutal.

When you first sit down to play it you'll have 90% of the game mechanics nailed down in the first hour, that's because DEFCON has something that I wish every other strategy game had - less. There's no resource management, no unit manufacturing, and no research trees. You can't take over enemy buildings or control new territory, there are only 8 units including buildings, some units have unlimited ammunition, and everyone starts with the same set of units.

Missile Command

That's not to say that DEFCON is lacking in the strategy department, far from it. Tearing out the non-essentials just shifts the strategy more to an area that most people manage quite well in - being a sneaky b*stard.

You start the game in DEFCON 5, and your only task is to place your units as the clock counts down towards DEFCON 4 then 3, at which point hostilities commence and you can't place any more units. Radar dishes allow you to see all units within their radius, missile silos shoot down incoming missiles as well as functioning as anti-aircraft batteries, and airfields predictably are where you launch planes from, of which there are two kinds. You have three types of naval units - battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines. All of the units do what you'd expect and their effectiveness against other types of units is common sense.

The first thing you learn when playing DEFCON is that missile silos are very good at shooting down incoming nukes, and if you cluster them around your most populated cities you can repel a considerable sized attack. The core game-play comes from the gamble of attacking, of exposing your weakness, of sacrificing lives now for the potential of many more enemy lives later. The second you switch a silo from defensive mode and launch nukes every player knows it. If you go all out and launch 50 or 60 nukes at once the smile will quickly be wiped off your face when bombers swarm over your borders, and subs off your coast attack your now defenceless silos and cities.

All of this is seen through the Big Board - a glowing blue screen with bright vector style graphics to represent everything. The interface is extremely easy to learn - left click a unit to select it, left click an enemy unit to attack it, right click somewhere to move there, all very simple. Aside from using the WASD keys to move around there's very little else you'll need the keyboard for, which means you can jump straight from the tutorial to an on-line game without worry of asking other players which key you press to do something and the answer being a chorus of "F10".

Real-Time Strategy

You can change the speed of the game at any time - at full speed a game will last around 15 minutes, in real-time a game could last between 3 and 6 hours. The much touted office mode is played exclusively in real-time, and the Introversion lads must be serious about playing this game at work since they've included a "boss key" which hides the game in the system tray.

Where DEFCON won't be able to compete with current RTS games is single-player mode, because it doesn't have one. There's no campaign to play through, no "sides" with various unique units to try out, and no real AI either. The CPU players are fine for a practise game but they're no substitute for real people, they aren't sneaky b*stards and they won't join or betray alliances.

Since multi-player mode is where you'll be spending the bulk of your time with DEFCON you'd expect the multi-player portion to be extremely well developed, right? Well sadly that's not quite the case. Make no mistake, on-line with friends DEFCON is a great game, and on LAN with friends DEFCON it's downright brilliance, but there are an alarming number of issues that detract from the experience. When you create a new game the options all revert to default settings, which means your game will be password-less and visible to everyone until you change it. Once you've changed the options they don't save, which gets annoying if there's two or three tweaks you like to make in each game.

The server browser lacks some of the most basic features you'd expect - you can't filter servers, you can't sort them by name or number of available slots, you can't search for a particular server and you can't make servers you play on often favourites. If you want to join a game by IP address there's no way to enter a password, instead you have to scan through the server list to find the right one. You see servers with names like "JAMIE! JOIN THIS ONE!" quite often.

Once you've got your server going and your friends have managed to find it and join and you're finally playing there are yet more problems. Once the game's underway you can't kick abusive players or go back to the lobby and restart the game. Once the game's over you can't say "another game?" because you have to shut down the server and create a new one, which everyone has to find and join, again.

Genocide 'em up

And yet in spite of the above I can't recommend DEFCON enough, it's pure gaming gold. Introversion will sort out the teething problems and they'll fix all those bugs, that's pretty much guaranteed. It's absorbing, thrilling, and disturbing all in one. You'll watch with glee when your gambit pays off and you wipe whole continents clean, and you'll agonise when your team mate switches sides in the middle of an assault and bombards your cities. Strike, counter-strike, GAME OVER.

Genocide has never been so much fun.