Whatever happens, don't miss out on DEFCON. Best Strategy game of the year no doubt.
DEFCON is a game where you control a basic world map in the sky. It's 2D and you must choose a territory to place your units. There are six to choose from: Russia, Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa. Once you've chosen your territory you must place your units somewhere in your territory. You have Radars, Missile Silos, Airbases, and Fleets. The Radars are used to increase your range and accuracy. The Missile Silos are used for air defense and lauching nukes. The airbases are used to shoot down fighter aircrafts and bomb cities with nukes, and finally, the fleet are used to attack on water. Once you've done that, you have 5 DEFCON stages to strategize. You cannot rebuild or build any more units after DEFCON 3. If your units are destroyed then you can't get them back, simple as that. DEFCON 3 allows you to attack with aircrafts and fleet, but when DEFCON 1 comes up, this is where all of the fun (and disaster) begins!.
DEFCON 1 is truely where the game starts to play. This is where you can launch nukes and bomb cities. The trouble is, you've only got a limited amount of nukes you can launch with your silos, so you have to use the nukes on the subs and bombers as well, which requires alot of strategy. You also don't know where the opponents' units are either. However, you can see their cities, and they'll probably reach yours first. You must use fighter aircrafts and air defense to defend your territory. The game starts to get hard when they start to launch a seemingly countless amount of nukes at you at the same time. Your air defense just can't shoot them all down. However, while they are doing this they become more vunerable to attack, so there's a better opportunity for you to attack them back with nukes.
When the nukes and bombs hit the cities, you lose a large amount of population, usually in the millions. Each million of the population lost gives you 1 point, so if they bomb your city and take out 3 million people, they get 3 points. If you bomb one of their cities and get 15 million kills, you get 15 points. It's a good scoring system, and can be modified on how you want to score in the full game. Once you and your opponent(s) have nuked a certain amount of cities, the victory timer appears, and when that reaches zero the game ends.
It's a pretty complex strategy game, but it's pretty fun online as well. With the demo, you are limited to only play 1 opponent and 1 game mode. You can't change the options either. While DEFCON is still fun on the demo, it's just not as great as having 5 opponents on the full game. "IT'S A BLAST!" is how I would describe it. Spectators are also welcome to join the game as well, however they'll miss all the fun if they do that.
Strangely enough, there isn't a single player mode anywhere to be found on DEFCON. There's only a Join Game or New Game option. Anytime you do the New Game option, the game always assumes you want to play against someone online, so it just goes to show that DEFCON was always supposed to be online anyway. However, you can turn online mode off in the options so it's not too much of a problem. You can choose how many computer opponents you want, but there doesn't seem to be a CPU difficulty setting, so the CPU is more balanced out on here. Also, the Join Mode lets you join an internet or LAN game online. DEFCON has many different game modes. One of them is the Office Mode, where you play a match for 6 hours and you can't pause the game at all. Even when you minimize the game it's still running because you get told what events are happening in the game. It's a great mode to use if you work in an office because you can just minimize the game by pressing the escape key. Other than that it's pretty much the same as the original mode.
The other mode named Speed DEFCON is almost like the original mode except you only have 15 minutes to finish the match, because the game is always at a fast speed and you can't change it. Pretty fun nevertheless. BigWorld is literally a world that's twice as big, and you get double the amount of units as well! The only catch is that the units range have halved and it makes the game harder. However, the best mode in my opinion is Diplomacy, where all of the teams are the same alliance but then they break up slowly (or fast, it depends) and the last survivor wins the game.
The graphics in DEFCON are actually really good! They may be 2D but the sleek and flash presentation of the game makes this game look modern. Sure the units arn't detailed at all but I think it's pretty cool seeing a nuclear world map launch nukes all over the place without being too detailed. My only complaint would be that everything moves super, super slow if you don't speed the game up. Plus, the style editor lets you change the colours of the map so you could have a green map or a red map if you wanted to. You can literally customize all of the graphics in this game.
The sound in DEFCON is probably the worst part of the game. There's only one music track and although it works pretty well it would be better if there was more music in the game. In Office Mode all of the sounds are turned off, so that's ok and in a way the game is better without the music. However, it's not too much of a problem. There's not many sounds but when you bomb a city you can hear some sort of explosion noise which is pretty cool. Other than that there's not really that much sound in the game.
I think it's amazing to see a game like DEFCON become a huge success. The developers arn't really the biggest in the market and they've managed to pull off one of the best strategy games ever made. Having them sell this game for only 10 quid is amazing, and it's an offer you can't refuse. You won't find it in the shops, but if you go to "www.everybody-dies.com" you'll be able to buy this awesome game from there. I think it's funny to see how a game I've never heard of until this week became my favourite game of 2006. (so far) Just goes to show, you don't need top of the range graphics to make a good game like this. Maybe the developers will release this in the shops, but whatever happens, don't miss out on DEFCON. Best Strategy game of the year no doubt.