Great starting video and not much else.
User Rating: 6.8 | Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 PC
In recent years the RTS market has been flooded by Command & Conquor clones and Dominions Storm Over Gift 3 is no exception. However it does do a couple of things to stand out. First off the starting video is absolutely amazing! It tells the story of a sacred (and powerful of course) artifact over a distant planet in the gift system. Of course rather then share the power the 4 races in the galaxy: the Humans, Mercs, Darken, and Scorps break into war on the planet's surface. This is accompanied by a pulse pounding techno soundtrack and a series of truly aswsome combat confrontations. To this day (in 2005) i have not seen a game with a better opening cinematic then this one! However after the intro finishes it is pretty my all downhill from here. The graphics look decent but are very pixelated and lack the simplistic bueaty of other rts. Units and terrain look pixelated regardless of resolution. However on a side note i would like to point out that the interface does and menu system both look very nice and are well detailed. The sound is decent with a nice techno soundtrack but is nothing spectacular or memorable excluding the intro music that is. Likewise the unit sound effects are decent and don't grate one the ears. Now as for gameplay Dominions makes a few big misteps here. For starters the units and buildings are pretty run of the mill here. There are cheap and massable infantry, medium speed tanks and walkers, and slow but powerful super units. And let it be noted that the races add very little to gameplay experiance. They use the exact same units and buildings with just slight cosmetic and statistic changes. Now games are played out with the formulaic building up of a base and then trying to capture more resources then your enemy. At least Dominions trys to tread off the beaten path a little bit when it comes to unit design. Two examples where already highlighted in the gamespot review but several others are race specific. Now i konw what you are thinking; but Inquisitor i thought you said that the races didn't change anything. Well technically they each have one unique unit that is near the end of the tech tree. These units range from the Scorp Digger (yes thats its name) which lets you transport units underground and popup into an enemies weak point to the Merc Widowmaker which mind controls enemy units and puts them under your control. Originality issues aside though Dominions makes two big mistakes. First off is that the campaigns are mind numbingly difficult. And not in the good oh look the computer outwitted me way. No the single reason (well two reasons actually) that the campaign is so difficult is because the computer is always one or two techs ahead of you. When you have tanks he has walkers, when he has walkers he gets artillery, when you get artillery he gets bombers, ect. This makes you start out every battle at a disadvantage with the only way to win being to have more units then your enemy. And the fact that the computer starts out with a fully developed infrastructure and army and you don't doesn't help this problem at all. However one nice feature is that the computer doesn't have unlimited resources so you at somepoint it will run out of resources and be unable to continue producing units. This seems to be the main tactic in later levels and after about halfway through any of the campaigns these battles all basically become wars of attrition. Now if you manage to slog through the long, repetitive, and frusterating campaign you can then go on to multiplayer. It seems alright sporting compatibility with Mplayer a known internet server. However it does suffer from a lack of skirmish which could have been a chance to fight the computer on even ground. If you can find this game it should be at an insanely low bargain bin price and i recommend you pick it up just to see the intro movie and maybe the cool interface. But just don't expect more then a few hours of enjoyment out of this RTS.
