Introversion are as innovative as ever - another must for the collection!
Set in the style of the Cold War classic film Wargames, you take the role of a general in a bunker, whose only view of the outside world is a large map of Earth with all its major cities. Within a few short minutes of starting a game, the world will inevitably spiral towards a nuclear war of mutually assured destruction as DEFCON 5 becomes DEFCON 1.....or will one side come off the victor of a battered world?
DEFCON divides the world into several territories - Europe, North America, South and Central America, Asia, the USSR (although bizarrely ex-Iron Curtain countries like Poland and the Ukraine are part of the European territory), and Africa. Australia presumably continues having barbecues in an effort to stave off the cold of nuclear winter.
It is your duty to defend the citizens of your territory's cities from the many horrors of nuclear attack. In a rather callous fashion, you gain one point for every million "enemy" citizens slain and lose two for every million of your citizens you fail to protect.
The first two DEFCON levels (5 and 4) are relatively peaceful - this time is used to deploy all your allocated units (either from a fixed pool or a customised one) on the world map in order to attack and defend. Each unit is critical to success in its own way, and like many other games, there is a fine balance involved with all of them.
Radar dishes are your first priority, as they have the longest line-of-sight of any unit in the game and can see almost everything coming their way . This allows you to spot incoming nukes from a long distance so they can then be shot down. Their weakness is they are totally defenceless and one nuclear attack will destroy them, so there will always be a tradeoff between how much you want to defend some of your more distant monitoring stations and how far you want to be able to see.
The most important decision you will have to make is where to deploy your missile silos. Not only do they have a stock of 10 ICBMs capable of hitting targets anywhere on the planet, they also double as anti-aircraft defences, so you may want to place these near your population centres. Critically, they cannot fire nukes and down enemy nukes simultaneously, and transitioning from one ability to another takes several minutes. Not only that, but firing an ICBM permanently marks the silo's location on enemy maps, so picking your moment properly is essential.
The next most important assets are your airfields. These launch both fast short-range attack fighters, good for engaging most naval and airborne targets, as well as shooting down nukes if you're lucky. If you lose some, don't worry, they are replenished at the airfield itself, albeit very slowly, so don't be too reckless with them. Each airfield also houses five slow moving bombers, which can either unleash a powerful anti-naval attack, or use their long range flight abilities to fly to enemy cities to drop short range nuclear missiles. Despite their weakness, you will resort to using bombers a lot more often than you think you will - their range and the fact that their nuke launches don't trigger huge alerts on enemy maps make them very useful.
There are then three classes of naval unit - battleships, carriers and subs. Battleships can attack naval and airborne units but are very vulnerable for subs. Carriers are essentially mobile airfields, but without the ability to regenerate fighters. They can also depth-charge enemy subs. Subs have average anti-naval ability, which improves with their active sonar ability, but makes them vulnerable to counterattack. You will most often use subs for their onboard medium range nuclear missiles, however bear in mind this forces them to the surface where all units can attack back at them.
All of this may sound tricky at first, but the tutorial covers all aspects of gameplay while giving you the chance to launch a lot of nukes.
While DEFCON does not have the complexity of C&C Generals, don't be fooled by the simplistic units - the balances between units and the tradeoffs you have to make in order to attack and defend properly make you consider each battle properly. If you order your bombers to repel a naval attack early on in the game and you fail, you will then have five nukes sitting uselessly in your airfield for the remainder of the game. If you are not careful with your carriers, five more nukes will sink to the bottom of the sea. Each tactical decision must be weighed up - even moving your fleets can be risky, as due to their slow movement, by the time you realise you've let a wolfpack of subs into your waters, your cities be crumbling.
DEFCON's gameplay has an interesting dynamic in that the nuclear missiles you have are for all intents and purpose, a resource. How you deploy them can make or break you - firing missiles from your silos too early leaves you unable to defend yourself from a similar counterattack. Firing a few of your missiles too early can also illicit a panicked response from your enemies, and sometimes 50 nukes too many then rain down. The game duration also revolves around nukes - when the total number of nukes remaining is less than (usually) 20% of the original, a timer starts counting - the person with the highest score at the end of this timer is the "winner."
Scoring is computed via a very callous system; which is just one example of how Introversion have gone out of their way to bring home how sterile warfare waged in this fashion can be. Sending your first nuke against a city and seeing "NEW YORK HIT: 25M KILLED" flash up on the screen gives some a chilling feeling. The one aspect of the game set up to deliberately contrast with this tone is the ambient soundtrack - a melancholic set of tracks, overlaid with the wooshing rumbles of nuclear explosions, and occasionally, the coughings and screamings of suffering human beings.
The game is graphically very simple, but the map has some very useful overlays that depict territories, radar coverage, orders given (movement and target lines), population density, and units with nuclear weapons. Other neat little details are the trails all units leave behind them, and the slight green tinge of radiation left behind. The sights of dozens of missiles creating arcs over the Pacific Ocean, with luminous green clouds and glowing white fireballs floating over ravaged cities is sometimes an intriguing and downright perverse beauty of game design.
The game allows you to play against up to 5 CPU opponents, but you can also play online, with several different game modes besides the basic one described here. Most games have a couple of spectator seats, so you can watch the proceedings unfold and learn and discuss tactics as you do so. Naggingly, there seem to be no filter options in the game listings as of yet, but as this game is being supervised by the ever-more present Steam, an update can't be far away to fix this - and it's a testament to how good DEFCON is that I have to resort to this for a criticism!
So, there you have it. Introversion game no. 3 - DEFCON. It's cheap, it's easy to obtain over Steam. Buy it, and let it blow you away.