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When it came out nearly two years ago, Dark Reign had to find room among the heavyweight RTS games with Blizzard or Westwood stamped on the box. Sure, it had cool units, original strategic features, and a decent story - but it just didn't catch on with the masses and floundered against direct competition from Cavedog's Total Annihilation.
Given its relatively cold reception, it's nice to see Activision stick with the property for another go, with Pandemic Studios (Battlezone 2) enlisted to produce the follow-up. Right away, it's easy to see that addressing the overall look and feel was a prime concern. The original's 2D sprites have been replaced with polygonal units and full-3D terrain. Tickets
These are some pretty damn gorgeous graphics. The textures are colorful and detailed, and you have extensive control over the camera view - you can swoop down to get a soldier's-vantage eyeful of the action, or direct things from a more traditional top-down view. It's a lot of fun early on to send infantry in suicide waves and then zoom in close to watch them get shredded in graphic detail.
That said, the units themselves are not nearly as detailed as those in Ground Control - where there are many more animations - and the terrain is much more constrictive. Many of DR2's maps are little more than mazes, making it very frustrating to bumble about the map uncovering the fog of war just to find the right path.
A story ripe with clichi doesn't help: A far-future Earth is about to be ruined by excessive terra-forming (well, duh!) and the Jovian Detention Authority (JDA) is charged with keeping order. The JDA, however, know where their bread is
buttered and serve the interests of society's elite. Enter Robin Hood, who comes in the form of the renegade urban "Sprawlers," who rise up to battle the JDA.
It merely serves as a backdrop to some 20 single-player missions, split into two campaigns, one for each side of the struggle (there's also multiplayer for up to eight players, and a skirmish mode to simulate a multiplayer experience).
Unfortunately, the campaigns really fail to shine. The missions are tightly scripted and fairly generic, coming mostly in the "build base, gather resources, eradicate enemy from the map" and "navigate this map maze with this paltry force" varieties. And you can't carry units or structures over from one mission to the next. So how much ass you kick (or have punted) in a given mission really doesn't matter, which is a shame.
Now, a word from our sponsor: "Hello, I'm crystals, and I will be your resource element today." As you harvest crystals with your resource collectors, there's a least a small twist on the norm. The crystals come in relatively small pockets that are spread far apart about the map, and they do not regenerate. So, once you've used up one pocket of gems, you better have gained control over another one somewhere else. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to just sit back and build for an hour before worrying about combat. Battles between small groups of units will happen early and often in the search for resources, and the outcome of these control point skirmishes plays a large part in whether you win or lose the game.
The unit variety is lackluster, particularly on the JDA side, but at least they are well-balanced. There are a few standout units, though - the jetpack-equipped scout Enforcers, the Judas unit with an anti-tank weapon in each hand, and the morphing Infiltrator who can assume the shape of an enemy unit, for example.
What no one will care for is the artificial intelligence, specifically the units' path-finding abilities. It's as if all the units are still in the first grade - you remember, when the teachers made you walk in
single-file lines wherever you went? When you select a group of units and tell them to go somewhere, they kind of fumble about and seem to insist on going in single file. You can thwart this somewhat by using the formation commands, but even these are kludgy and aren't 100 percent reliable. And, in the campaigns, I often witnessed several of the computer's troops standing idly by while I wasted a building or another unit right next to them. I doubt this was programmed lethargy!
DR2 brings a potentially cool feature to the table and then reduces it to a gimmick: the simulation of a full-day cycle. That is, day turns to night and back to day again as you play a mission. However, were it not for the narration that jumps in informing me that it is now night or day, I would hardly have noticed. Sure, everything gets a little brighter or dimmer, but it would have been nice for this to be more exaggerated. How about an actual sunrise and sunset, and combat by moonlight? Supposedly, certain units (such as the Infiltrators) are more effective at night than others, but I really didn't find this to be a battle-turning feature.
It may sound like I'm bitching a lot here, and if I am that's because I wanted DR2 to be more than the original with a 3D facelift. And at its core, that's all it really is. Sure, in look and control, DR2 is very well-crafted. Unfortunately, when you get down to the gameplay, it feels like a rehash of the traditional 2D model. Purists may like it, but there's not much here to help DR2 burst into the mainstream RTS limelight dominated by StarCraft and Age of Empires 2. Simply going 3D is not enough to compete these days, not with better options like Earth 2150 and Ground Control out there.