Today I'm here to review Dark Reign: The Future Of War. This game is an oldie made back in the good old days of 1997. This game was one of the first RTS games which came out at around the same time as Command & Conquer and Warcraft II. Considering the age of this game, I'm not reviewing it completely as though it is a new game considering the age of the game; but even considering how the game has held up over the years, I think it's going pretty great.
Many RTS games these days tend to have at least two types of resources to work with. One basic resource and one advanced resources with which to make stronger things or research new things with. Some have even more types of resources; Dark Reign has one... and a half. The most important resource in this game is water; the story goes that most of the water has been poisoned and now fresh spring water is a valuable resource. So you collect enough water until it gets launched off-world in exchange for credits which you use to spend on things. Easy enough, right?
Now, why would I say there's a half of another resource? I say that because you also have to power your buildings using a resource known as Taelon. That sounds pretty important.... but if you have enough credits, then you can keep building new power plants to power your things without filling them up with Taelon because every power plant is already half full when it's completed.
The campaign in this game I think is done wonderfully. There are 12 levels in total and you can play each one in control of either of the two factions in the game. That means there are technically 24 levels in total... but if you only want to play each level from one side, you only have to complete 12 of them to get to the final level in which you play a "third" faction which has access to all units from both sides in the game.
The two factions in the game as seen above, are the Freedom Guard, and the Imperium. As this is an early RTS game, the two sides really aren't very different. They have nearly the same tech tree with some differences in units, but for the most part, everything is quite similar even when you get down to the units available to each side. I could take some points off for this, but as it is quite early in the timeline of RTS games, this isn't a huge concern for me. The game seems pretty well balanced and I can see how it could be quite competitive as a result.
So from me, Dark Reign will get a 10/10. If you haven't played this game but are a huge fan of the Real Time Strategy genre, then you have to pick this up from GOG and give it a try. This was and still is one of my favourite games of all time. Yeah, maybe I'm giving it a higher score than it deserves, but this truly is a wonderful game and you really should give it a try.
~ Kyle Welykholowa
