Beautiful and haunting. A game of try skill, but with some frustrations.
Based upon the 80's film Wargames, DEFCON is Introversions third game. It's half way between chess and Risk, meaning most games are won or lost before a shot it fired. The player controls one or more regions of the world and a set number of buildings and units for the entire game. Once you've lost those units, or the civilians populating your cities, you can't get them back.
Over the course of about half an hour (using the standard rules), the game progresses through DEFCON levels 5 through 1. Each level allows you greater access to your units abilities. DEFCON 1 and 2 means you can only move your naval units (including destroyers, carriers and submarines). At DEFCON 3 and 4 your navy and airforce (fighters and bombers) will engage enemy units. And at DEFCON 5, it's thermonuclear war. Anything goes as nukes fly across continents and oceans, wings of bombers bear down on cities and submarines surface off your coast to wipe out key cities and outposts.
They key to the game is timing and placement. Spend half an hour directing your submarines to the enemy's coast and they'll be in place just in time to surface at the very moment that their missile bunkers switch from air defense to missile deployment. As is the case with most units, these missile bunkers have two states. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and takes minutes to switch between, leaving them vunerable for an age.
DEFCON, like Uplink and Darwinia before it, is packed full of atmosphere. Minimalism is the word with the world map displayed in simplistic, angular lines and units represented by arrow heads, boxes and hemisphere type symbols. When a nuke lands on a city, there's a white blot obscuring the map for a while, green radiation spreads across the land and plain white text which politely informs you how many million people have just died. A low rumble marks the detonation of such a missile, which brings me to the music. The music is about the only sound at all in DEFCON and it's limited to strains of something similar to Barber's Adagio for Strings and the off cough or sob. Yet this simplicity is remarkably engaging. While a singleplayer option is available, the true game is in multiplayer. Team up with friends or strangers for a tense 3 on 3 match, wondering if they'll stab you in back and whether you should stab them first, or pile in on a free for all game, where the world attempts to obliterate itself.
There are a range of different and fully customisable rule sets for both singleplayer and multiplayer games (which both use the same menu system) and it's easy to find a random game to join. However, it's very difficult to find a particular server or friend at this point. There are no options to filter servers and the servers shown to you is intentionally restricted so Introversion's machines can cope with the massive demand. Hopefully, these niggles will be fixed in future but for the time being they do hold the score back.
Buy it, start it, find a stranger... then blow the world to pieces.