Defcon-It's WarGames as Real Time Strategy
Introversion’s new game DEFCON harkens back to 80’s video games where the learning curve is gentle, the interface is uncluttered while maintaining a strategic playground of infinite depth.
With all the nuclear sabre rattling in the world right now with Iran starting a “peaceful” nuclear program, North Korea successfully testing a nuke detonation it seems prescient of Introversion to release Defcon now.
The 80’s feel may not totally be arbitrary. As anyone who has seen the 1983 movie WarGames knows, DEFCON is short for Defense Condition with a 5 to 1 countdown rating on the state of seriousness of a nuclear threat. Defcon starts the game at Defcon 5 with some sobering statistics of nuclear yields, massive projected death tolls and radiation effects. To underscore the consequence of MAD doctrine and the game Introversion has named the site http://www.everybody-dies.com.
From there play in real time against a clock to the final missile launch. The goal is simple, protect your cities, resources and military arsenal while destroying the same of your enemies. Sort of like Missile Command but with the ability to shoot back.
Defcon’s mulitplayer elements come into play with “alliances”, secret chats with other players to team up against others. Of course since there can be only one “winner” eventually someone is going to play Brutus which only adds to the fun.
Like some other 80’s games each match is relatively short at 15 to 30 minutes unlike the grueling mulit hour matches of some modern games.
It seems this game has hit a nerve as the developers note on their site the download servers were slammed during launch but things have settled down now. You can download from their multiple mirrors or bittorrent. I chose bittorrent for the demo and the 59mb only took about 10 minutes.
General reviews from various sources so far have been excellent.
1Up gave it a 8.9.
PC Gamer gave it 97%.
IGN gives it 8.8.
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