Sunny Man’s Blog

October 1st 2006

(2) DEFCON - Everybody Dies

Gaming, Internet

Leaving the Nintendo and Microsoft bandwagon, I thought I’d tell you about a game that I was introduced to yesterday by a friend. From the creators of Darwinia and Uplink, British game designers Introversion give us DEFCON. If you’ve ever seen the film ‘War Games‘ (1983) - A young man finds a back door into a military central computer in which reality is confused with game-playing, possibly starting World War III - then this game is just like that except much better. Although not a free game, I thought I’d write about it because the demo is amazing.

Game Statistics

There’s not really a backstory to this game. You open it, make or join a game and wait until you can launch nuclear weapons. You choose a territory to play with: South America, North America & Canada, Asia, Africa, Russia and Europe. You take control of your forces and deploy radar stations, air bases and missle silos around your territory near the major cities. At the start you can only see your enemy’s major cities and have a limited view of any enemy positions (air bases and silos etc.). You start off at DEFCON 5 and that stage is 5 minutes and 45 seconds and work your way down to DEFCON 1. It’s at DEFCON 3 that the fun starts. At that stage you can unleash your first wave of attacks. As well as the missle silos in your territory, you have naval fleets.

These include 12 carriers, 12 submarines and 12 attack vessels. The carriers carry both bombers and fighter planes. Bombers are long-range planes that return automatically to the carriers after they’ve attacked their target. The fighter planes are short range combat craft that run out of fuel pretty quickly and are good in swarms. The carriers can be used to detect and destroy enemy submarines as well. Your submarines can covertly creep up on to the enemy and get closer than any other unit. They can unleash nuclear warheads (but only when DEFCON 1 is reached) and because they’re so near, they can reach almost every target from their position. The attack vessels are just that. They attack any enemy ships or planes they encounter. You need to use these to defend the carriers because the carriers cannot actually defend themselves. You get points for the more of the population you kill (nuke the bigger cities) and also the military installations you destroy.

Gameplay & Controls

The game basically uses just 4 areas of control - W,A,S and D to move the view around, the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out, the left and right mouse buttons and the space bar to deselect units. The controls are simple but are powerful when managing your fleets and units - the controls are easy to remember and quick. When dealing with your fleets, you just select one of the units in the fleet and that unit acts as the whole fleet and moves to where ever you specify, while when launching planes or bombs, they act individually for more freedom.

The graphics are so simple, so basic they just work. They are reminiscent of old arcade games like asteriods but with colour! The gameplay is so addictive that the graphics would spoil the game if they were anything like modern graphics. There are 4 main parts of the screen: the units panel, main panel, the defcon indicator and timer and the the score board. The units panel lets you place all your units; your radar positions, silos, fleets and air bases. This panel is to the left of the screen. The main panel lets you see different things on the map like radiation, your territory, your units’ current orders and your radar coverage and this panel is to the bottom right of your screen. The defcon indicator and timer is at the top of the screen. Although you couldn’t miss the announcement of the different decon levels in the middle of the screen, this is useful to keep checking up on the status. And finally, the score board is your average scoreboard that shows who’s winning - or, who’s losing the least, let’s say.

Genocide? Gimme…

The game, although not free, is a very respectable price - you can even get a boxed version! The download only version is £10 / €14 / $17.50 and a boxed version (only available from the official site) is £15 / €21 / $26.25 (shipping included). I was reading the forums on the site and they were talking about how the game was pirated a week before it was officially released and how most of who pirated the game actually went and pre-ordered it. I’m not condoning pirating, but it shows that if even pirates are willing to shell out for this game, it must be that good.

Go and download the demo today and take a look. Join an online multiplayer game or create your own against the computer. It’s a fun, addictive and strangely evil game that you should play. You win by losing the least…