Original War Review

It would be easy to write a review of Original War--one that used its tremendous misnomer of a title as the launching point for an urbane, New Yorker-esque critique of time travel and gorillas, which unfortunately is too often what passes for game criticism these days. It would be much harder--but still easy--to criticize the game's dated graphics, simplistic gameplay, incredibly bad voice acting, and nonsensical plot. In fact, criticizing any given element of Original War seems gratuitous, since taken separately, these elements are almost parodies of themselves. The game's plot is silly and further undermined by its atrocious sound, the gameplay makes Red Alert 2 seem like a complex strategy game, and the graphics can cause you to lead your units into a dead end that seems like a gully but is actually a cliff. Despite these nominal problems, you can actually find yourself getting caught up in the game. Not for long, mind you, but it can happen.

The graphics in Original War are remarkably unoriginal.

From all appearances, Original War is very similar to Fallout Tactics, except for the fact that it's really nothing like Fallout Tactics. While both games are played in real time, involve characters whose skills increase with experience, and make you fight through linked episodes of a really bad story as might be seen in comic books, Fallout Tactics plays at least nominally like a role-playing game. Original War, on the other hand, is almost in all respects a real-time strategy game from 1995.

The game's plot involves going back in time and mining some kind of future miracle substance in Siberia and then reburying it in Alaska so that the good guys control it when the time to discover its magical properties happens. Since mining simulations haven't exactly had much of an impact on gaming, a bunch of time-traveling Russians show up to make Original War a member of that much better-received genre of games, the simulation of blowing things up.

In one of those twists that game developers used to shock gamers back in 1990, Original War actually combines elements of several genres, to the extent that naming your units automatically makes something a role-playing game. These units can gain experience in four classes--soldier, mechanic, engineer, and scientist--and once they have been killed, they are lost forever. This leads to a lot of saving and reloading, since units die very quickly.

The role-playing element includes awarding experience points.

Characters actually possess levels in each of these specializations, and you can switch between specializations at various times by entering a specific building that functions as a sort of changing room. Apparently, Original War's designers figured that if they couldn't make something original, they could at least make it incredibly cumbersome so that players feel like they're accomplishing something: only mechanics can drive vehicles, only soldiers can fire weapons, only scientists can heal, and only engineers can construct buildings and collect supplies. Thus, even if one of your characters has a high skill in some area, if he hasn't been specifically designated as a certain class, he cannot perform that class' functions. This leads to such contrivances as the need to construct an armory at the end of each mission, in which you didn't otherwise need one, simply to change all your characters into soldiers so that they can actually fight.

Original War's graphics and sound aren't just bad, but they're also confusing. The game's voice acting is bad in two ways: first, it's just plain bad, and second, many of the unit acknowledgements don't actually match the voices that particular character uses in dialogue. Furthermore, the cartoon heads that appear when a character speaks compare unfavorably, from an aesthetic standpoint, to portraits in role-playing games circa 1993. The rest of the game's graphics have the hand-painted look of Baldur's Gate, which not only places them squarely in 1998 but also makes them very confusing to navigate. While the game supposedly takes place in the Pliocene Epoch, it doesn't feel much different from any other computer game setting, except for the occasional saber-toothed tiger or apeman.