Dark Colony (Gametek)

Mars may look pretty barren to the Pathfinder space probe, but in this game by the late 21st century we started to make it habitable and 100 years or so later, megacorporations have colonised it and shortly thereafter run into aliens.

So far so different, but from what I could tell from an early demo, Dark Colony is considerably less innovative than its initial premise. My suspicions were aroused as soon as I read about “Petra-7  deposits” over which the settlers fight with each other and with the aliens. Then I discovered you start with a small base that you have to defend and gradually build up, purchasing additional buildings and weapons and exploring the surrounding terrain as you go. Yes, we’re in Command and Conquer territory again.

For those who somehow missed one of the gaming sensations of the mid-‘90s, in Command and Conquer (and Dark Colony) you have a single, immobile base camp from which you build and send off units and mining units which you use to harvest Tiberium… er… Petra-7 which gets you the points you need to add buildings and defences to your base and build more units. You move units in order to explore or fight simply by selecting them (clicking on them or dragging over them) then clicking on a destination or an enemy.

What new wrinkles has Gametek added? Well the game certainly looks a treat – all of the creatures, buildings and exotic alien flora and fauna are high resolution and move around (and kill each other) in a realistic fashion. When alien “Sy-Daemons” use their “Bio Scythes” on human infantry they bleed convincingly (a little too convincingly for my taste). Dark Colony borrows from other space strategy games in allowing you to use research to develop new units and improve the weapons and armour on existing units. There are also artefacts of an earlier alien civilisation left around with random, usually nasty effects – some demoralise your units, others suck them into a black hole and still others zip around the map simply chopping up any units that get in their way.

A couple of weaknesses of Command and Conquer have been tidied up - if you’ve lost all the units in an area you will no longer see when new enemies enter that area (though you will still “remember” the terrain). We are also promised the ability to set way points for movement so you can send your units from one side of the map to another around difficult terrain or concentrations of resistance without having to monitor their progress at all times.

The biggest disappointment is the main battle units of the humans and aliens themselves. The human units look impressive enough and have scary names – “Reaper” and “Firestorm”, but underneath the hood of each they are simply infantry, armour, artillery and air units. The aliens don’t appear to use machines, relying instead on specially-bred battle creatures which could have made for some really unusual fighting techniques but an “Atril” with a regenerating explosive mucus sac is just a heavy artillery unit by another name. The mix of speed, weapon strength and armour between humans and aliens may be different, but the basic way they fight is basically the same and both sides have the same variety of fighting units at their disposal. As far as I was able to tell, the only units to be added to the familiar mix are snipers and mines.

I only saw an early demo version, but considering the strength of the competition in this popular market area there was little I could see to persuade me to plunk down my hard-earned on something as also-ran as this.