Pc Game Database

World in Conflict

Everybody wants to nuke the world.

When Whitesnake starts playing during World in Conflict's single player campaign, you'll realize that it is love that you're feeling. The love of a perfectly placed artillery barrage; of a city once whole turned to rubble; of maneuvering tanks through debris to attack an important strategic location; of our most favorite nemesis, the USSR. The warmth in our hearts today isn't from family or friends, it's from the tactical nuke that wiped out a group of enemy veteran heavy tanks, mobile anti-air, and infantry that allowed our team to sweep in and claim victory in a multiplayer match of World in Conflict, one of this year's finest real-time war-games. Massive has created an excellently destructive entertainment experience that we think nearly any action junky will enjoy mightily.

Epic destruction is everywhere in Massive's latest. It's a game that's among the prettiest RTSs we've seen offering up detailed units, large well-rendered environments, and some truly spectacular special effects. The visuals in World in Conflict are brilliant on all fronts and provide an easy entry point for all comers to immediately sink in and enjoy some fast-action strategy though the price of entry may be expensive if you're only in it for the big effects. Running everything on very-high at 1900x1200 can cause some serious frame rate dips on even a computer with an 8800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a Quad Core processor when the effects really start flying. Thankfully, the game still looks pretty at medium detail, which most medium range PCs should have no problem with.

Massive has also made entry easier for the average Joe by keeping the army size down to a minimum, keeping base and economy management out of the picture, keeping game times shorter, and the gameplay more immediately aggressive. It's something Massive originally tried in their Ground Control series that they've updated and improved mightily here. It's a completely tactical approach that allows players to focus on unit positioning and the use of unit special abilities. The result is a game that's accessible to all, including that more casual demographic that's used to snorting the instant thrills provided by shooters.

This doesn't mean that the game is simple. In fact, it's not. World in Conflict focuses heavily on team-play in multiplayer (the single-player reinforces through certain mechanics) much in the way that a first-person shooter like Team Fortress or Enemy Territory does with their class balancing. While you can choose to spend your requisition points (the game's easy version of resources) on units outside of your specialty, they're encouraged to spend those points in their domain as the few units for purchase outside of the specialty are expensive. This need to balance units and function within the team, not just within the individual, is what really makes World in Conflict tick so perfectly as a multiplayer game. Players dropping in during the middle of a match, something also unusual for a multiplayer strategy game, will be able to see where help is needed and fill any void.

The paradox inherent in wanting to allow accessibility to inexperienced strategy players and the need to work smartly as a team in a strategic environment may be the multiplayer's one slight weakness. It can be frustrating to be on a team that can't work together at all if the other team is even moderately organized (if you've got a bevy of heavy tanks and no one helping with anti-air support, you're in trouble). It may not be too different from a comparable type of FPS, but those games still have the fun of being able to use your twitch skills to better others. The lack of twitch means more reliance on teammates to make the victory come. Of course, this isn't to say you can't have fun just getting in a game to roll tanks around, fire some rockets, and drop some nukes, but the truly epic gaming experiences come via teams that at least vaguely know what they're doing.

This can be especially important given the massive nature of some of the game's tactical aid devices. As you deal damage, heal units, or capture strategic locations (think Battlefield 1942), you'll gain tactical aid points that can be used on everything from radar scans to the game's delicious tactical nukes. Dropping such ordinances on friendly units is bad for business.

Thankfully, World in Conflict also comes with a crystal clear VOIP system that should help players warn of their impending destruction. It should also be a boon for new players seeking to get in touch with their teammates, learn from veterans, and participate quickly and easily in coordinated attacks and defenses. When it's clicking on all cylinders and everyone on your team is involved, World in Conflict is one of the best multiplayer games of any genre out on the market.

It's good that Massive has spent time trying to make sure their Massgate multiplayer service is clean and feature-filled. Everything from clan support to tournaments is being provided for the hardcore while the more casual player should be able to find others of their ilk quickly via player matching. Add to that the ability to broadcast games via the nifty system of cameras and telestrating tools and you've got a game built for a competitive community.

While the game was designed primarily as a multiplayer game, single-player hasn't been thrown to the dogs. The campaign provides a well presented and explosive spectacle right from the moment that the Russians invade US soil and artillery begins to pummel Seattle. It's a non-stop ride from there with very little down time to gather your wits, which fits the tactical nature of the game quite nicely and provides us adrenaline junkies a constant fix.

The story is consistently well presented from several angles. Massive not only tells the strategic and tactical nature of the Soviet aggression via terrific load-screen briefings voiced by Alec Baldwin and constant radio chatter by the main characters and leaders in the Allied forces, but also the more personal side of war via several well developed characters. Each is quite different in their motivations and the chance to learn more through the art slideshow cutscenes of phone calls home helps you invest that much more. Both the personalities of the characters and tactical information mix together in the well directed in-engine cutscenes in each mission. Finally, there are a couple of FMV cutscenes, both of which you've probably seen by now (check out one of them below) if you've followed the game at all and they mix the music and action very well together. Overall, the story presentation of the single player package is excellent.

The campaign moves smoothly from location to location documenting the war across the American Northwest, New York City, and various parts of Europe. Each of the missions offers something different and encourages players to become more familiar with each of the army types by providing only certain kinds of reinforcements. It's not as rigid as the multiplayer (you'll often have helicopters and tanks under your command simultaneously) but is great for introducing the power of each unit type by offering up opportunities to take advantage of special abilities against the enemy.

It's also impressive how the campaign teaches ideas of teamwork. It's common for your commander to give you an objective only to turn it over to an AI teammate in order to present a new objective. While that AI is guarding a strongpoint, you'll have to press forward to take another strategic objective. It's something that'll become like second nature in the multiplayer game and is offered up smoothly in the single player game. In fact, the campaign is full of the pleasant trickery that makes you feel like part of something huge when you're only commanding a modicum of units. There's so much action and destruction happening all around that you're not directly participating in that it's hard not to feel the intense heat of the explosions when in fact, you're quite focused on a small section of the battle. There were only a few objectives that will push you to split your forces farther than a few hundred meters apart.

Single player also happily provided liberal amounts of tactical aid points on several occasions allowing a huge array of explosives to be dropped near constantly on the enemy. You just don't know how satisfying it is to call in three carpet bombing raids, fuel air bombs, and massive artillery strikes all at the same time. Bliss.

RTS veterans and action fans alike should find this to be an action junky's dream, but those of you who pride yourselves on high mouse click-per-second capabilities and are OCD micromanagers may find it a bit on the easy side. I can't say I was particularly hard-pressed to complete any of the primary objectives (some secondary were more challenging), even on hard, though I've also played a ton of real-time games over the years. I'd recommend any RTS vets to pump the difficulty up to hard for sure. Part of the issue likely has to do with the enemy AI that occasionally showed potential, but mostly ran straight into the line of fire instead of taking advantage of their surroundings and special abilities. It's a little difficult to say what exactly makes the game more difficult on hard as the AI tactics seemed unchanged and didn't make use of unit special abilities like I thought it would.

The expansion pack for Medieval: Total War adds a ton of great content, but little else that's new or improved.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

I've always enjoyed the expansion packs for the Total War series much more than the original games. The original Medieval's Viking Invasion and Rome's Barbarian Invasion were smaller, more focused titles that played to the series' strengths (battlefield combat) while cutting down on some of the tedious management on the enormous campaign map. Kingdoms, the expansion pack for Medieval II: Total War, directly follows this pattern and expands upon it by offering not one but four huge new campaigns for "Total Warriors" to sink their teeth into. While the new content doesn't offer any real game play innovations (and the few new features included are of dubious quality) the new campaigns alone will be enough for fans of the series to want it.

At the heart of this expansion are the four new campaign settings. First up is a Crusades map in which a pair of occupying Christian powers (Jerusalem and Antioch) go toe-to-toe with the warriors of Islam and the might of Byzantium to establish the Kingdom of Heaven. Britannia details a 13th century war between the English and the Scots, Irish, Welsh and Norwegians for control of the British Isles. The Teutonic campaign pits the pagan Lithuanians against Christian powers (including the dreaded Teutonic Order of Knights) in a clash between the Old Gods and the New Testament. Finally, the Americas make an appearance in the New World campaign which follows the footsteps of Cortez and the Spanish as they battle to defeat powerful Native American nations such as the Aztecs, Mayans and the Apachean tribes.

Each of these campaigns is of top quality and arguably better than the monstrously huge European map that came with the original game. Players who thought religions were fun in the original game, for example, will have a blast with the Crusades map. Christian nations get awesome knight units that prove their fun value that first time they crash into an exposed enemy flank and display why people without firearms never argue with 1,300 pounds of horse and armor. Playing the Byzantines is more of a diplomatic thrill -- trying to get the Christian and Moslem factions to slaughter each other without falling back on the amusing but notoriously temperamental Greek Fire Throwers.

The Britannia map offers two basic choices. Players can be the English who start holding half the map but quickly find out why nobody tries fighting on four fronts at once while dealing with an internal insurrection. Playing as one of the smaller factions is tougher, but more fun as they try to nibble away at the English and dodge their big, mailed fist. The Teutonic campaign offers the Lithuanians the choice of economic growth by conversion to Christianity at the cost of the loss of pagan-only units. The New World campaign bears more than a little resemblance to Rome: Total War's Alexander expansion (at least while playing as Spain) in which the powerful, technologically advanced but horribly outnumbered Spanish must lean more and more on Indian mercenaries and friendly local powers as they try to defeat the Aztecs to conquer America.

What each of these campaigns share is a smaller map and a tighter and more focused strategic challenge. The biggest drawback of the original game's campaign was the mid-to-late game doldrums that found the player hitting the "autoresolve" button on a lot of one-sided battles. There's no such dead-time in Kingdom's campaigns. A smaller number of provinces on each map along with well-balanced factions and well-paced "events" (such as European Crusades on the Crusades map or a revolt of English nobility in Britannia) keep the game moving and provide constant new obstacles for players to overcome.

The amount of content gets even deeper when replayability is considered. Each map comes with between five and thirteen new factions to play with. Each has its own starting position along with historically inspired strengths and weaknesses. The Byzantines, for example, have their Greek Fire Throwers but must hold on to Constantinople in order to use them. The Teutons have awesome mounted Knights but are hampered economically by only being able to build castles. The clash between the Crescent and the Cross on the Crusade map is a fascinating challenge marked by Christian reliance on heavily armored infantry and an Islamic force built around cavalry and speed. It will take a long time for even the most dedicated Total War fan to burn through this much content.

It's only in the New World campaign where the game's design begins to break down a bit. Ironically, this isn't because the campaign is strategically unbalanced, it's not. It's because the campaign is built around a fight between antagonists that were historically unbalanced. In order for the game to work, the player controlling the native forces had to have a chance against the technologically superior Spanish. As a result, the Native American factions are less fun to play because they're based on massed infantry and huge numbers without the strategic diversity enjoyed by the other factions in the game. While the American campaign is a lot of fun, there was a definite missed opportunity here to explore pre-Columbian Native American warfare, a fascinating and (to our knowledge) under-explored area for strategy games.

There are a few more issues in Kingdoms. Some are carryovers from the original game that Kingdoms does nothing to address. The game's strategic AI on the campaign map has been buffed up a bit but still has some blind spots (like coastal cities) that can be exploited by a savvy player. Cavalry path-finding is still kind of wonky. Players will need to baby-sit the guys on horseback because they sometimes refuse to take anything approaching a direct path to their destination. Even worse, they sometimes pull up short during a cavalry charge. This kind defeats the whole purpose of "charging." The AI of subordinate generals who reinforce the player during multi-army battles is... well... "strategically-challenged" would be a genteel way to put it. A more colorful way would be my loud shouts of "Where are you going, you moron?" and my determination to never use a back-up army again.

Then there's hotseat multiplayer. This is easily the most baffling and pointless addition in Kingdoms. Hot seat multiplayer allows two players to play a campaign map against one another at the same computer. This works fine from a technical standpoint, but does raise the question of why it was included at all. Hot seat multiplayer removes the single greatest strength of the Total War franchise by autoresolving the real-time battlefield fights. What's left is an over-complicated Civilization-style strategy game with very long turns. We suppose there may have been an outcry among Total War fans for this type of gameplay that we somehow missed. In that case, here it is. Enjoy. For anyone who's actually going to try to play this way, though, here's our advice: bring a book -- a long one. We hear the new Stephen King is a good read.

In the end, players who know and love Medieval II won't be dissuaded by the annoyances present in Kingdoms. Minor pathfinding errors and a gameplay mode most will never touch can't possibly compare with the chance to run a Crusade, face down pagan warriors, beat back the Irish or battle a blood-thirsty horde of Aztecs looking for sacrifices. The Creative Assembly team knows what Total War fans want, and the huge amount of new content found in Kingdoms is it.

Once more into the breach, dear friends.

By: Steve Butts

Even assuming that you've played it since it was released, it's a safe bet that there are still some surprises left in Creative Assembly's Medieval 2 Total War. But assuming that you've seen everything there is to see in the game, the developer is offering up a wealth of new content in their latest expansion pack, Medieval 2 Total War: Kingdoms.

The first thing you'll notice about Kingdoms is that it takes a ridiculously long time to install. It seems like ages ago that I was shocked by a game that took up a full gigabyte on my hard drive (No One Lives Forever, I think), and the 4GB's worth of content that this expansion packs makes that seem like small potatoes. On the plus side, each of the game's four campaigns is installed as a separate file, so you can install them as you need them.

Once your two-hour installation is over and you start the expansion, you'll see just why Kingdoms takes up so much space: there's a staggering amount of new content here. Just going by the numbers alone, you'll have four large campaigns, 13 new factions, 50 new building types and over a hundred new units. Judged purely from a standpoint of quality Kingdoms is definitely worth the attention of any hardcore Medieval 2 player.

Each of the four campaigns covers a historically significant conflict from the Medieval era: a five-way fight for the British Isles, Crusades in the Holy Land, religious wars against pagans in Northern Europe, and even the Spanish conquests in Mezo-America. Each campaign comes with numerous new factions, new units (including named heroes with improved abilities), more detailed maps, and some interesting opportunities to flex your strategic and tactical muscles. Each new campaign also comes with a whole of specific presentation elements, from new cutscenes to entirely new soundtracks.

The Britannia campaign is the meatiest of the lot. Starting in 1258 players can either take on the role of England as she tries to gain control of the islands or of one of four other players -- Wales, Ireland, Scotland or Norway -- as they fight to keep England from gaining dominance. At first glance, it seems like England has the easier task here. Though she has a large empire and lots of troops, she's surrounded by enemies and has lots of problems with unrest at home. In addition to fielding enough armies to take care of the small Welsh and Irish factions, England will have to protect her coasts from Norwegian raids and keep some troops at home to deal with the inevitable uprisings that are sure to come.

In terms of the other factions, the players will have to hold out long enough for England to waste herself on other fronts. It's not so much a campaign of rapid advances as much as it is one of avoiding battle until your enemy shows a weakness. Of course, on the English side of the fight, you'll want to take out a smaller neighbor as quickly as possible to shorten the list of enemies you'll face.

Those who thought it odd that the original game didn't have more of an emphasis on the war for the Holy Land will be happy to see the Crusades campaign here. Focusing on the two Crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem and Antioch and their war with the Turks, Egyptians and Arabs, this campaign really captures the spirit of the setting nicely. There's plenty of historical panache here, with mamelukes and mailed knights clashing in front of eastern cities in the desert.

Bishops aren't quite as important as generals or spies, but this is a religious war with two very clear cut opponents. Between them sits the Byzantines with their unreliable but oh-so-enjoyable Greek fire weapons. Off the map to the east and west are other European crusaders and the Mongols. Their appearance will be a nice surprise depending on which faction you're playing and where your borders are.

The Teutonic campaign focuses on the attempts of Christian nations, led by the Teutonic Order, to convert the Lithuanian pagans. The Teutonic faction gives players a chance to get their hands on some truly amazing knights that can pretty much ride roughshod over pretty much any enemy that gets in their way. The only trouble is that most of the other factions are prepared for fighting the Teutonic Order so you'll have an uphill battle with very little chance to launch a sneak attack on your enemies.

Though there are other significant players in this campaign, the other real standouts are the Lithuanians. As a slightly less advanced faction, they won't have access to the heavy troop types of their neighbors, but they have plenty of irregular forces that are ideal for fighting in the nearby forests. Moreover, they have very powerful Holy Warriors that they can recruit so long as they remain a pagan faction. Knowing when to convert to Christianity in order to gain the significant diplomatic advantages it brings is a particularly interesting problem for the Lithuanian faction.

The Americas campaign is the biggest departure from the standard Medieval 2 model. Rather than forcing players into a contest of equals, the Americas campaign highlights the technological differences between steel and gunpowder of the European armies and the less advanced but more numerous Native American tribes like the Aztecs and Apaches. While it's an interesting historical simulation, the inequalities inherent in the setting really make it seem like the native factions are designed to lose. Spain starts out with significantly fewer troops, of course, but their technology more than makes up for it, particularly when you consider that the natives have no access to cavalry or boat transport. Sure, it's accurate from a historical standpoint, but it's not nearly as fun as the other campaigns.

Even with everything that expansion adds, it fails to address some of the series' perennial problems. The strategic level interface is still hard to read and it can be difficult to sort out what's what when groups of armies gather around a city. Building and assembling armies, and setting orders and tax rates for your cities still takes far too much time and effort. Also, the performance still seems to suffer, particularly when there are lots of units in a given battle.

AI pathfinding is still a bit wonky, both on the strategic level and the tactical level. On the overland map, armies will automatically choose to go the long way around when shorter routes are blocked by the enemy and cavalry will still run the wrong direction and stop short on charges from time to time. In both cases you can micromanage the movement to get the results you want but it's an issue that should have been resolved.

On the subject of AI, the allied AI in battles isn't always as reliable as it should be, leaving players no option but to personally direct them in battle. But since the entire allied army is led as a single unit, it's a bit unwieldy.

The new expansion also allows gamers a chance to play hotseat multiplayer with automatic battle resolution. Adding to the ways you can play Medieval 2 is never really a bad idea, but there's really no enjoyment to be found here. The strategic phases are far too long to maintain your interest during your off turns, and the automatic resolution pretty much eliminates the game's main attraction, tactical battles.

A dying genre is stabbed again.

By: Kip Merriweather

Oh adventure genre, where did you go wrong? You used to be fluffy and fun, witty and charming, and engagingly wicked. Now you're like the Dementors of the gaming world, sucking all the fun and frolic out of our most precious form of entertainment, leaving us with only boredom and despair. Your latest representative, Dead Reefs, only demonstrates again how far you've fallen on the PC. Not only is Dead Reefs' story withering in its pacing, but the control scheme is depressingly sad and the visuals, camera work, and puzzles are not much better.

The story, one of a cursed island with a deep history of piracy, meanders along with predictable characters, one of whom was murdered before the game begins. When Sir Amadey Finvenero, the player character, shows up to take on the investigation, the story unravels and we learn that the island mystery is a tad bit more sinister, and ridiculous, than it appears, revealed in an unprecedented twist.

That turn to the outlandish is jarringly abrupt. There's no gradual slope here, just a quick shove off a cliff that drops you into the gaping maw of madness when most of the game before it was a rather benign murder mystery/ghost story. The tale should be one of a rational man's journey into uncomfortably unbelievable territory, but not only does Finvinero not have much of an understandable transition for a character of his type, he simply falls over the edge with no real struggle leaving him transparent and dull. We're also left wondering what happened with many of the characters as several of them become suspects but then just disappear from the story never to be seen again. It's an unsatisfying ending to an unsatisfying adventure.

That underwhelming sensation is enforced by the visual presentation. While architecture is actually pretty decent and the dark mood is clear through the acceptably morose colors, character models are less than thrilling. Their movements are awkward, the lip synching is off, and the textures are muddy and bland. The most I can say for them is that in concept, they aren't bad designs. I can see how the characters, originally, could have had some personality to them that just didn't translate to a 3D environment.

Many of the visual presentation problems aren't only with the graphics. It's the animations that lack personality, cutscene direction that presents dialogue and movement as clunky and boring, and camera-work that round out the issue. The camera in particular is a real issue. There are many times, even with the option to change the camera angle, that it simply doesn't provide the view that you're looking for. Taking the adventure route of games like the original Resident Evil games, the camera angle switches while you're running around the environment with the character. This is designed to give a more cinematic and voyeuristic approach but in this case only provides headaches and awkward angles that hurt gameplay.

If it's not the video, it's the audio. Granted, the budget for the game was probably pretty small but the sound in the game is virtually non-existent aside from a semi-decent score and bland voice work.

Even with the problems of basic visual and audio presentation, Dead Reef's main failure is the insane interface. Any PC game that doesn't allow for mouse support and instead chooses to use the keyboard only is asking for trouble. Even crappy ports of console games allow for mouse control much of the time and at the very least, controller options. It's an unforgivably clumsy choice to make for any game, let alone a genre that takes advantage of the mouse to make looking for important objects and clues easier.

What makes the hunting for items worse than your normal point and click adventure is there are no hints for where items are or what's important in the environment. You're forced to use the pathetic controls to sidle up to every object in the environment to see whether it can be interacted with. Muddy environments hiding muddy objects that don't have any hint that they're objects (such as a glint or a slightly different color palette) means hard going when you're trying to find an item. One puzzle included finding a shroud in a graveyard that didn't stand out at all, which was especially frustrating since the game gives very little help about what you should be looking for. Puzzles are great. Frustrating people because they don't even know that there is a puzzle is a whole different thing.

The aggravation ends as all things do: in death. Death comes swiftly and with no warning, so save often. In some ways it reminded me of those old choose your own adventure books where you'd decided to turn to page 56 only to be eaten by a ravenous goblin.

The "spiritual sequel" to System Shock 2 is an artistic and gameplay triumph that raises the bar for every game that follows it.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch & Sal 'Sluggo' Accardo

[Editor's Note: This is a spoiler-free review.]

Every human endeavor has those moments when the bar gets raised for every creator that follows it. It's the filmgoer watching Citizen Kane sitting back and saying "I didn't even realize film was capable of that." It's watching Tiger Woods play golf or Frank Sinatra in concert and realizing that, yes, human beings are capable of creating transcendent experiences. It's also what happened to us when we finished playing BioShock, the "spiritual sequel" to the brilliant System Shock 2 that simply outdoes the previous title -- and, really almost every other game to date -- in every way. Playing BioShock is like flying for a moment with Michael Jordan just as he's about to slam the rock home.

Welcome to Rapture

BioShock tells its story through the eyes of a passenger on an ill-fated plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean in 1960. In the opening segment of the game, the plane crashes and the player wakes up floating in the ocean surrounded by burning wreckage. The only land in sight is a mysterious lighthouse that houses a bathysphere.

Upon entering it, the bathysphere launches and the player is treated to a propaganda film narrated by one Andrew Ryan. Ryan outlines the tenets of his Objectivist-style philosophy that caused him to reject the surface world in favor of an undersea nirvana where "The artist need not fear the censor, the scientist need not be bound by morality and the strong would not be held back by the weak." Unfortunately, after a stunning voyage through the exterior of Ryan's underwater city, the bathysphere lands and the player finds that things have gone horribly wrong in his utopia.

It's this storyline and the player's experience of it that mark BioShock's greatest strength. Initially, it seems like the cliched "kill the big bad guy" plot that's supported almost every FPS ever created. But the storyline runs much deeper in its observations of Objectivism and its implications: laissez faire capitalism, Romantic Realism in the arts, the elevation of the self, the denigration of the weak and the deification of selfishness. Even "Andrew Ryan" is a riff on author Ayn Rand, the founder of Objectivism and whose "Atlas Shrugged" is referenced throughout the game, if not directly, than at least in theme.

As the player progresses through the game, reversal follows upon reversal in a twisty maze of plot points until what started as a mere political allegory becomes a searing exploration of the true nature of evil that's guaranteed to keep players guessing until the end. It's no coincidence that the game's creators begged people who have finished the game to not reveal spoilers. The game acquires massive replay value simply from the desire to go through it again and track all those moments that take on new significance with the knowledge gleaned from finishing it.

Art Deco and Metal Fatigue

The true brilliance of the game's story lies in how it's delivered, particularly the sound design. While there are a few non-interactive cutscenes, by and large the player will piece together the history of Rapture through audio diaries left behind by the city's inhabitants. The voice acting in these recordings is exceptional, and since there's no break in the action, the diaries act as a sort of running soundtrack underscoring the game's brilliant art design. There were so many times when what was heard made the actions on-screen take on more significance.

The sad, insane mutated "splicers" who constitute the player's main enemy add to the story by babbling to themselves when they're not fighting. While not necessary to complete the game, listening to the well-acted voice clips presents a lot of insight into the philosophical underpinnings that caused Rapture's creation and made its fall inevitable. My favorite was one upper-class splicer voice that sounded like Katherine Hepburn who continually complains about the poor quality of a steak she had been served a long time ago and how she micromanaged her daughter's wedding. Other comments like "I wore it for you, Father," and "We followed your commandments but turned away from the light," (often spoken just before the Splicer leaps for the player's throat) continually underscore the current horror that is the crumbling city.

The storyline also comes through in the game's extraordinary art design. Visually, BioShock is simply gorgeous. According to an exhibit in the city's Welcome Center, Rapture was dedicated in 1946 and has been out of contact with the surface ever since. The result is a world designed to look like a science fiction story from the heyday of Isaac Asimov -- all vacuum tubes, brass pipes, Bunsen burners and sensual, rounded shapes. Rapture is an absolute masterpiece of Art Deco design, all brown and gold faux-Egyptian styling mixed with brass-colored accents and oak, teak and other rich, dark woods. The splicers (the mutated residents of Rapture) are clothed in slightly updated 1940's suits and dresses -- up to and including fedora hats on many of the men and female splicers in World War II "Rosie the Riveter" outfits. Even the advertisements that festoon the walls perfectly capture the pre-Pop Art organic style of the time. One can almost imagine that this was the world of Fallout before the nukes started flying.

Hunting Big Daddies

Of course, all the storytelling and art design in the world mean nothing without fun stuff to do in between listening to diaries and watching the windows leak. Deep inside BioShock beats the heart of an FPS, but, like so many of the characters that inhabit the game, the gameplay's been tweaked and augmented in so many ways that it would be a disservice to slap a simple FPS tag on it.

To start, the game sports a nice array of standard first-person shooter weaponry including pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers and flame-throwers, which you can use against the countless splicers roaming the halls of Rapture. The player can also develop their character via a series of "plasmids" that alter their DNA and offer a variety of special abilities ranging from electric and fire blasts to freezing enemies and shattering them with a wrench. As the player progresses, enemies get tougher and become immune to certain types of attacks, but no weapon ever becomes useless.

And while having two sets of traditional and plasmid weapons would normally be more than enough to keep most players interested, Irrational -- err, now 2K Boston -- just piles it on. Weapons have multiple ammo types that are more or less effective against different enemies. The environment is loaded with items that you can use to your advantage, like explosive barrels that you can hurl at enemies using a Telekinesis plasmid (giving the game a bit of Half-Life 2 flavor) or you can hack security turrets and cameras and put them to work for you. Tonics scattered throughout the game act as passive plasmids, giving bonuses like increased maximum health or shocking enemies that touch you, and you can scrounge dead bodies for spare parts that can then be turned into special ammo or other gadgets. You can take pictures of enemies to research weaknesses and get combat bonuses. While it's true that the game follows a fairly linear path in deference to the storyline, much of the combat has a freeform feel to it, and already we're seeing players sharing stories of how they got through certain fights in completely different ways.

Nowhere is this more true than the encounters with the "Little Sisters" and "Big Daddies" that roam Rapture. Without giving too much away, the Little Sisters' job is to extract "Adam" from the corpses that litter Rapture. Adam is a key ingredient in upgrading your plasmids, so you're forced to confront them throughout the game -- or, more precisely, the hulking Big Daddies that protect them. They'll ignore you until you attack, so you're free to clear areas or set traps until you're ready to fight. At one point we set up an entire corridor full of trip wires and proximity mines with an RPG emplacement at the end and watched in awe as a Big Daddy proceeded to charge through only to get felled with a last electric buckshot blast from my shotgun.

It's worth noting that (especially for hard-core shooter fans) even at their toughest, the game's fights simply aren't that difficult. That seems to be by design, though. While players can bull their way through the game using traditional FPS combat tactics, half the fun comes from finding novel and interesting ways to interact with the environment. Even dying isn't a problem as frequently spaced "Vita-chambers" will resurrect the player and any damage done to an enemy remains unless said foe manages to find a First Aid station.

Unfortunately, for all the brilliance of the game's design, a few technical issues with the PC version of BioShock may mar the experience for some gamers. There was some initial outrage over the difference between the game's implementation of widescreen and traditional 4:3 resolutions: the game uses the same field-of-view (FOV) settings in both cases, and as a result, playing on a 4:3 resolution shows a little more on the top and the bottom. There have also been reports of an audio bug in DirectX 10 set-ups that causes all the sound to cut out as soon as the opening cut-scene ends. As of this writing, 2K games has issued a statement that an official patch to address the widescreen issue is the works.

More problematic is 2K's use of SecureRom piracy prevention technology. This is a protection scheme that forces the player to not only have the DVD-ROM in the drive in order to play, but also to transmit an activation code over the Internet in order to play the game. There was a short period right after release when the verification servers went down, leaving gamers with legitimate copies of the game unable to activate it. The game also came with a two-install limit on each serial code (since raised to five by 2K), which places a cap on how many times gamers with legitimate copies can install the game. Even worse, the uninstall program doesn't reactivate the owner's code on the servers; for that, owners will have to download a "revocation application" that will reset their serial code in order to uninstall and re-install. Don't try calling the customer service number in the game's manual, either. Thanks to a misprint, the wrong number was put in. We're just surprised the game's box doesn't have a "Are You Sure You Don't Want The 360 Version?" sticker next to the Games for Windows logo.

Aside from this silliness, BioShock ran splendidly on our two test machines: a custom machine running Windows Vista and a GeForce 8800, and a Voodoo machine running Windows XP and a GeForce 8800. In both cases, we cranked the resolution up to 1920x1200 and didn't notice a single framerate stutter. Controls on the PC are arguably superior to those of the Xbox 360 version, not only for mouse and keyboard support, but also for having additional hotkeys which allow you to access weapons and plasmids with a single keystroke. While the art design is as amazing as it gets, some of the character models and texture work feels a little crude in spots (which, incidentally, was an issue with System Shock 2 as well), so it doesn't feel like there'd be much reason for any choppiness.

The one exception to that would be the game's water. The BioShock team had one member whose entire job was working on different ways of displaying water and the results really show. Water is basically a supporting character in Rapture through puddles on the ground, tiny leaks in glass windows, waterfalls that cascade down staircases or just sheets that pour down walls. It's a constant reminder that Rapture is dying, a tiny bubble six miles below the surface of the Atlantic waiting for enough metal fatigue in the beams or the cracks in the windows to grow wide enough that the millions of tons of water pressure outside the city can finally reclaim it. Rarely has a game imparted such a sense of oppressive isolation and the feeling of fighting inside a tomb.

Enraptured

Those few PC quibbles aside, BioShock is a triumph, an absolute masterpiece that needs to be played by anyone with the slightest interest in gaming. It's a high-water mark not just for the FPS genre, but for the hobby in general. Since it's set at the bottom of the sea, it's perhaps ironic to say that it's the kind of game you want to soak in from start to finish and then play all over again. In the world of videogames, there's nothing to be more proud of.

Welcome to Rapture.

By: Charles Onyett

BioShock is Irrational's finest offering to date, as well as the swan song for the Irrational brand in a way, since they recently relinquished their longstanding and well-established studio name for the more corporate, faceless tag of 2K Boston and 2K Australia. BioShock is a first-person shooter set in the fantastically unsettling city of Rapture, a metropolis built under the sea by the megalomaniacal Andrew Ryan. Throughout your lengthy stay, you'll find options for combat as intricate and enjoyable as the story and characters are to interpretation, something that only a handful of games can ever claim to offer.

But to call this game simply a first-person shooter, a game that successfully fuses gameplay and narrative, is really doing it a disservice. This game is a beacon. It's one of those monumental experiences you'll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured. This isn't merely an evolution of System Shock 2, but a wake-up call to the industry at large. Play this, and you'll see why you should demand something more from publishers and developers, more than all those derivative sequels forced down our throats year after year with only minor tweaks in their formulas. It's a shining example of how it's possible to bring together all elements of game design and succeed to the wildest degree.

Things kick off with your plane smacking into the ocean and your character having to take refuge in Rapture to survive. Irrational plays on the conventions of the first-person perspective by thrusting you through experiences that toy with and vastly strengthen that fragile, intangible bond between in-game protagonist and yourself. At times, it forces upon you moments of reflection, which is so important and rare in games, where you contemplate the nature of blindly accepted game conventions, which we can't get into for fear of spoiling things. It lays a relatively straight narrative path for you, but it never feels linear, a result of the gameplay as much as the narrative.

The target in BioShock, Andrew Ryan, is anything but a prototypical villain. He's a man of bottomless ambition who built a city under the sea, obsessed with the idea of what makes a man, what differentiates a man from a slave. He's the Randian hero, a man who holds his own creative vision above all else, and he's Rodion Raskolnikov's exceptional person, someone who can be excused for committing crimes to achieve a goal--and he knows it. His vision, Rapture, is clearly a colossal failure. The driving force behind the game is your quest to discover why this man's alluring vision of an artistic utopia failed so completely and why you've stumbled upon it. Even though Ryan spits out what seems to resemble totalitarian propaganda, you can't help but sympathize with him. He has alluring ideas, speaks them with conviction, and comes off as a sympathetic visionary despite his severe eccentricities.

As you continue through Rapture, you'll discover it speaks to the nature of what a single-player game is--why do we choose to play a game that isn't online, where you can't interact with others? Like reading a novel, it's to form your own impressions, to see the same events, hear the same words, and come away with a unique viewpoint. The thematic blending and twining of BioShock's personalities is so powerful, it acts like any good book or movie, assaulting you with its ideas, popping into your thoughts when you least expect it, and broadening your understanding of what a game can achieve. Instead of painting Good and Evil across the foreheads of Rapture's denizens with a neon brush, Irrational gave everyone murky motives, much like the shadowed, soaking environments you're constantly plodding through, or the blurred vision you get after walking under one of Rapture's ubiquitous waterfalls.

It's the little ideas that pop up from time to time that make this world so believable: the piano plinks that resonate as you browse menu options; the guitars you can actually play randomly scattered around Rapture; the way every room is realistically constructed reflects both the heights to which Rapture managed to climb as well as the decadence and sense of voracious, selfish entitlement that brought it smashing down. You'll hear some of the voice-overs muse, "Why do they wear the masks? Maybe there's a part of them that remembers how they used to be, how they used to look, and they're ashamed." Little bits like that get tossed at you, and you don't necessarily have to absorb them--they're not essential to plot or anything, but they're instrumental in making BioShock as immersive as it is.

The game is broken up into large sections, each separated by load times. Don't worry; these aren't load times like in Half-Life 2 where the game pauses unexpectedly. Instead, the load times are logically placed and never jarringly interrupt the experience or mar the immersion. Each section comes with its own cast of NPCs who aren't mere stage bosses--oftentimes you don't even engage them in combat. Instead, you are battling their ideals and their insecurities, grappling with their motivations as much as the splicer minions who so frequently assail you.

Just because the various versions of the splicers, genetically altered humans, are the standard enemies in the game, they still manage to exhibit as much personality as the rest. They're not zombies; they're totally aware. They're regretful of their condition, yet realize that there's no outlet for them, no opportunity to express themselves or be creative, like an intelligence crippled by hopeless drug addiction. That's true in a metaphorical sense as much as it is in the literal; they're trapped in an underwater city, after all, much like you. It's almost as if BioShock's enemies want you to kill them, to put them out of their misery. Sometimes they seem overly xenophobic and at others whimsical, gallivanting about with an ironic sense of humor.

They're such eerily spirited foes you may even come to pity them. The Big Daddies, for instance, Rapture's lumbering guardians, will wander around stages banging on outlets from where their wards, the Little Sisters, would normally emerge. If you've killed or freed the little girls, as you frequently must, the Big Daddy will invariably knock again and seem genuinely confused over why nobody's coming out as they stomp and groan their way to the next outlet. It's another example of the wonderful details that make Rapture seem so alive.

Then there's the actual combat, which presents a huge array of options. Each weapon in the game has three types of ammunition, all with varying effects. Then you've got a range of plasmids, genetic enhancements to your character that allow for magical attacks, as well as myriad types of tonics you can equip to augment plasmids' effectiveness or buffer your character in other ways. This isn't a game where you're simply limited to an SMG or grenade launcher to attack, though you can use those if you so choose. Tell a Big Daddy to protect you with a powerful plasmid and he swats away any attackers. Set up shock traps with your crossbow darts and rearrange them with telekinesis. If that doesn't work, throw bees at your enemies. Use the enrage plasmid and enemies will beat each other to death as you hide in the corner. Then, as they're fighting, set one of them on fire and toss a chair at the other. While some plasmids are more useful than others--electrobolt and incinerate in particular--the number of ways to dispatch enemies is really limited to your own inventiveness. Had this game been rife with AI problems, the combat system wouldn't have been nearly as good. But as it stands, enemies execute interesting attack patterns, and the plasmids that alter enemy behavior actually work, though we did notice one or two occasions when the AI appeared to glitch out, making the splicer stand still as we hit it.

If you wanted to it's entirely possible to plow through BioShock using only the most powerful plasmids, but where's the fun in that? You can set up sonic traps for enemies that fling them into the ceiling with deadly force, attach sticky grenades to environmental objects and hurl them at enemies with your telekinesis plasmid, hack security bots to fight for you, or use the decoy plasmid to keep your enemies constantly guessing your real position as they absorb bullets from your commandeered machines. So while there certainly are methods of attack that can be deemed the most effective, you're really missing out on what makes this game so thrilling if you fail to experiment.

And experimentation is something you'll almost be forced into against Big Daddies, who appear in every stage of the game. You'll find the game is designed to force you to fight these things, and the damage they deal and punishment they can absorb requires quick reflexes and inventive, on-the-spot problem solving. This goes especially for those playing on the hardest difficulty setting, but even on medium Big Daddies put up quite a fight. Should you die, which as long as you're not playing in easy mode you certainly will, you get revived at checkpoints called Vita-Chambers. Though you get back some health and Eve, a bar that governs plasmid use, enemies don't. For instance, if you've been hammering away at a Big Daddy for five minutes and gotten him down to around a quarter of his health, that's exactly how much he'll have after you die and return to battle. It ensures enemies can eventually be killed with enough persistence, which might be a nagging feature for some.

Hacking comes into play quite a bit, since through the associated mini-game you're able to control flying bots, turrets, reduce prices at vending machines, and open otherwise inaccessible doors and safes. The mini-game itself requires you to match up sequences of tubes to allow a liquid to flow uninterrupted from one specific point on the screen to another. Various tonics in the game can modify the challenge, and you'll find the system possesses quite a bit of depth. Should you eventually get tired of hacking everything, you can always make auto-hacks through the item invention system or, if you're facing security bots, load up some shotgun shells and blast them to bits. With the PC version, hacking is a more streamlined process since you don't have to move a cursor around with thumbsticks - you just hover over with your cursor.

Besides hacking and modifying plasmids, there are a few other interesting ways to divert your attention. Embedded later on in the game, you'll find a camera that opens up a whole new system of character ability modifications. Scattered around Rapture are one-time use weapon stations that let you further augment various aspects of each armament. These aren't always out in the open, and often you'll need to consult your map to see which rooms in a stage you've missed to find them all. A nice feature of BioShock is you can revisit previous stages at certain points. Enemies will have respawned, so you can pull more money, Eve and health hypos, and various other items from their bodies while backtracking to uncover whatever rooms you may have passed by.

If you're debating which version to get, the PC version handles better. In part it's because of the greater precision with the mouse and keyboard, but also with how the plasmids and weapons are selected. With the default settings RMB switches between the two, LMB fires, and we preferred the mouse wheel to an the Xbox 360 version's bumper clicks for quickly cycling through. By hitting Shift you can bring up a plasmid and weapon selection screen if you so desire, but the mouse wheel scrolled through fast enough to stay useful. Note that you can't set LMB to fire a weapon and RMB to fire a plasmid; there's only one fire function. We also noticed the option to bind the functions "switch and fire weapon" and "switch and fire plasmid," but when we tested it out these only switched from weapon to plasmid and back again, much like the RMB default function. All weapons and plasmids are also bound to the number and function keys, making it even easier to ensure you always have the ideal attack at the ready.

One thing we were delighted to see is how effective the wrench, the game's only melee weapon, remains throughout the whole experience. Through various tonic power-ups it can even become more powerful than a majority of your firearms. Since you swap plasmid powers and tonics in at out at any of the specific vending machines, it allows you to alter your play style on the fly and utilize the full range of what's available.

Really the best aspect of BioShock is how well all the disparate elements blend together. Story plays out mostly through voice-overs, allowing you to stay immersed in the action as plot and character is fleshed out. The sound design is simply amazing here, from the laments of splicers and the groans and thumps of Big Daddies to the sickening smacks and cries of combat to the startlingly realistic ambient noises and humorous calls of the vending machines. Even the near-death alert, which pipes up when your character is low on health, is expertly woven into the game's overall soundscape, unlike other games that test your levels of aural tolerance with sharp and distracting beeps. Every character's voice is well acted. Andrew Ryan in particular is a joy to listen to, with enough vocal gravitas to give Stephen Colbert a run for his money.

To really appreciate the sound in this game, and not necessarily the frenzy of combat, but merely the ambience of Rapture, just stop moving your character when he's alone. Now crank the speakers, or headphones. You start to hear the metallic clanks, the otherworldly whispers, piping up at various distances away, impressing upon you the notion that this world doesn't stop at the walls around you. No matter where you are, there's always the water, a trickling undercurrent of audio, reminding you of your precarious position within this crumbling city being crushed on all sides by an indifferent ocean.

The visuals too will constantly amaze, from finely detailed industrial structures to the weapon models, the choices of which areas to light and which to leave in the dark, and plasmid effects. And then there's the water. It's so gorgeous, rippling and gurgling through every one of Rapture's hallways, tumbling from ceilings and, of course, encasing the city itself. You get lots of little details to enjoy as well, like the welts on your hand when you boot up the insect swarm plasmid, the steam jets that hiss from Big Daddies after they've taken damage, fish in tanks and in the ocean that dart away as you approach, and the flickering billboards and tattered posters that remain from Rapture's glory days. The PC version definitely outclasses the Xbox 360, mostly because of the ability to crank the resolution to 1920 x 1200. If you've got a Vista rig with a DX10 card, you can expect some heightened particle effects, crisper real-time shadows, and more dynamic water, but the game looks gorgeous regardless. On our gaming PC running a Core 2 Quad processor with a GeForce 8800 GTX, and 4 GB of RAM, it ran very well, with only a few occasions of seemingly random framerate hitches. We also couldn't find an option to switch between DX10 and DX9 modes; the game just seems to default to what's in your system, unlike Lost Planet.

If there's anything disappointing about BioShock, it's the ending. We found the resolution to be somewhat abrupt for a game in which so many things are colliding and bubbling beneath the surface. Nevertheless, it's no reason to be dissuaded.

Be careful what you wish for.

By: Reggie Beck

For years now we've been suggesting that someone out there needs to update the old Microprose classic X-COM UFO Defense. This game allowed players to manage a worldwide military organization tasked with defending the nations of the world from an alien invasion. Combining intense tactical battles with "big picture" strategic play, it ranks as one of, if not the, most enjoyable PC games ever.''

''Over the last few years or so we've seen quite a few titles try to recreate the magic and mayhem of the original game. Most have fallen short either by missing the point of the game altogether, or by shifting the balance too far towards an unpleasant extreme. Matrix Games' UFO Extraterrestrials fails with an entirely new third approach, sticking too closely to the original and ignoring the chance to put their own spin on things.''

''Players are put in charge of an alien-fighting force on the planet Esperanza. The initial base comes equipped with interceptor craft that are used to shoot down any UFOs that come within the base's detection range. Squads of soldiers and armored vehicles can be dispatched to investigate these sites and, later in the game, assault alien installations around the world. Success in these missions causes your soldiers to improve in their fighting ability and nets you some cool alien tech that you can research back at the base. ''

''As you discover the mysteries of alien technology, you can then build advanced equipment to deal with the growing alien menace. The more successful you are in your mission, the more funding you'll get from the nations of Esperanza. Get enough money and you can even enlarge your operation by adding additional radar and intercept bases around the world.''

''It's a compelling design but its success requires the cooperation of several different elements. In this case, there are definitely some high points. Watching your troops improve with each mission until they develop into a highly effective alien killing force is definitely one of the game's most rewarding payoffs. Unlocking the secrets of an alien technology and then turning it on your foes is another of the game's undeniable joys. Unfortunately, tedious tactical battles and annoying limitations on base management will keep you from otherwise enjoying the things that the game does well.''

''There's not much of a story beyond the first cut scene and even that's not worth much. This initial cinematic not only makes a space battle between aliens and humans seem downright boring, but it also features some of the worst voice acting we've ever heard in all our years playing videogames. We fact, I hesitate to use the term "acting" here because of the stilted and lifeless performances that we're given by the voice over team.''

''Still, while a little story would have been nice, you hardly need much of an excuse to defend your planet from an alien menace. Here your xenophobia is pretty much taken for granted so it's assumed you don't actually need to know why the aliens are out to get you. The fact that they keep sending their spaceships flying over your head is reason enough to shoot them down and send a team out to the crash site to kill any survivors.''

''The turn-based tactical battles definitely convey the right sense of menace. Stepping off your troop transport is incredibly nerve-wracking. Just the mere suspicion that an alien could be waiting to get off a shot at you before you're even off the ramp is enough to get you interested in the action. This is particularly troublesome given that the enemy AI seems to be able to see much farther than you and has weapons that far outclass the ones you begin with. You'll also suffer from the lack of a simple overhead map that gives you the general layout of each level. And don't even get us started on how your soldiers have virtually no peripheral vision and no option to reserve action points for opportunity fire.''

''You will initially appreciate the variety of the maps but as the number of missions ramp up you'll start seeing lots and lots of repetition. Thankfully, there's lots more variety found among the aliens you'll be fighting. Each level seems to offer a number of different types of foes to fight and the smart player will eventually learn how to prioritize the most important targets. Word to the wise: don't neglect the ones with the huge arm.''

''The levels teem with destructible objects, which you'll really get to see the benefit of during your more enthusiastic firefights. On the other hand, the aliens don't have too many structures to hide behind and those few that do exist aren't likely to hold many aliens. More likely than not, you'll simply find your foes just hanging out in the wide open spaces of most levels or simply hanging out in the saucer waiting for you to come and kill them.''

''While the repetitive maps, lack of an overall view, and interface omissions impact your enjoyment of combat, the real kicker is that none of your soldiers will ever die. You can lose them by abandoning them in the mission area but otherwise, not even the most vicious alien attack will ever do more than simply send your soldier to the hospital for a few weeks. It certainly helps you to develop a stronger fighting force by the end of the game, but it also means that much of the tension is completely undone. How much can you really care about putting your soldiers in danger when the worst that can happen is that they have to sit in a hospital for a few weeks?''

''The only real consequence of having a wounded soldier is that they won't be available for upcoming missions. You should be upset with yourself for leading your troops into harm's way to begin with, but you wind up being more upset with the limitation on the game's recruitment options. Rather than letting you manage your own recruitment, the game gives you a set quantity of soldiers and forces you to make the best of it. You'll get new recruits from time to time, but it's not anything you have any control over. This can lead to situations where you've got lots of cash and the goodwill of the world but can't field a full team because several of your soldiers are still recovering in the hospital.''

''The strategic portion of the game takes place on a global level. Esperanza is divided into large zones and you'll need to make sure you build enough detection and interception bases around the planet to provide good protection for your most generous funding nations. Unlike X-COM, you can only really have one specific soldier base, so you won't get the same sense of lots of different teams working around the globe.''

''Many of the functions of the bases are automated for you. We already complained that soldier recruitment is entirely out of your hands. Additionally, hiring and firing of scientists and engineers is tied directly to the presence of your labs and workshops. Money for rearming and refueling comes directly out of your account regardless of whether or not you'll be running a deficit, which can tend to frustrate your economic outlook during the lean months.''

''The graphics are a bit outdated and suffer from some performance problems. Individual units and environmental assets look decent enough during the tactical battles, but the jerky animation and the questionable effects tend to ruin any sense of realism that you may experience. With X-COM at least you were fighting over towns and cities that gave you a sense that there was something worthwhile at stake. Esperanza has no such effect on us. I mean, why are we fighting for this crummy planet anyway?''

''Moving past the graphics, the sounds aren't any better and are, in many ways, worse. The voice talent leaves a lot to be desired and the music, if possible, is even more dated than the graphics. If this is what passes for music on Esperanza, the aliens can have the planet for all I care.

Go beyond the stars and beyond history with Beyond the Sword's superb new rules and scenarios.

By: Tom Chick

As if Civilization IV wasn't addictive enough, here comes enough new content to swell the ranks of CivAnon meetings around the country. Beyond the Sword has pretty much everything you could want in an expansion pack, and then some. A few aspects are disappointing, but most of it is really good.

First the bad news: The fancy new espionage feature that lets you spend money and send spies running around the map to wreak discreet havoc? It's a mess. It adds a lot of busy work from the get-go, which wouldn't be so bad if the interface wasn't so clumsy. Pretty much everything about it runs counter to the clean, cool elegance of Civilization IV. Spying is fussy, expensive, and often useless. Unfortunately, it can't be switched off, and it's wormed its way thoroughly into the core game. Hopefully, a patch can clean up the interface.

The new corporations aren't as bad, partly because they're limited to the later stages of the game, and partly because they can be useful. However, they're also very demanding, requiring a lot of attention and resources. What's worse, they're often a crap shoot. Found a corporation and you can either run away with the game or shoot yourself in the foot. How lucky do you feel?

The new units add more endgame shenanigans, but overall, the game actually needs far less. Fortunately, these are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to Beyond the Sword's new parameters. Many changes to the basic gameplay are actually fantastic. For instance, the new rules for naval blockades, privateers, and overseas trade add a lot of extra strategy, lending powerful teeth to the naval game. It's nice to see all those blue squares matter for a change.

The new random events (optional, thankfully) present a menu of choices whenever disasters or opportunities strike. They're a wonderful addition in terms of adding flavor and atmosphere. Similarly, there are changes to forts, spaceship victories, air combat, and sieges that have significant effects on how the game plays. Kudos to Firaxis for rolling up their sleeves and making such subtle but important improvements.

Where Beyond the Sword will really win you over is with the new scenarios and mods. There is some truly wonderful stuff in here. Final Frontier is a complete makeover that sends Civ IV into space, rendering it all but unrecognizable and inviting comparison to classics like Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations. This "mod" isn't just solar systems instead of cities and space ships instead of armies. It's a vividly realized sci-fi setting, with distinct factions, interesting terrain, and a lively unit balance among capital ships, squadrons, missiles, and star bases. If you buy Beyond the Sword for just one mod, this one would be it.

The Gods of Old mod fleshes out the godly subgame by introducing ancient religions with powerful magical effects. It's also an example of a mod that almost falls apart due to poor documentation. Next War adds a whole new sci-fi stage with distinct units and technologies at the end of the game. It even gives you an epic 5-faction world scenario to play with if you want to jump straight to the mechs, clones, and automatons. Defense is an amusing puzzle style diversion. Broken Star is a whimsical scramble to secure stray nukes in a crumbling Russian empire. Charlemagne is a clever scenario built around developing papal favor, while Crossroads of the World is a medieval money-making scenario that makes clever use of the rules for corporations.

Two of Beyond the Sword's fan-made mods deserve special recognition. The fairly dry and meticulous World War II scenarios are Dale Kent's shout outs to old-school wargamers who love shuffling armies around giant maps. The real stand out, however, second only to Final Frontier, is Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (creator Gabriele Trovato's online moniker is Rhye, hence the name). This mod combines the elegance of Civilization with the historicity of Europa Universalis. It's easy to jump into at the historically timed birth of the civilization of your choice, and it's infinitely replayable. See if you can accomplish each civilization's unique victory conditions, which play out like fiendish historical puzzles, or just try to survive while the ebb and flow of history plays out around the world. Rhye's and Fall is one of the most exciting and robust mods you'll ever see for a game. Bravo, Mr. Trovato!

On the other hand, two scenarios are particularly disappointing. The weird zombie X-Com mod called Afterworld gets points for style, and then immediately loses those points for tedium. Age of Ice, drawn from Derek Paxton's epic Fall from Heaven fantasy mod, is a canned puzzle map that plays like a Heroes of Might and Magic scenario. You're better off waiting for Paxton's latest version of the Fall from Heaven mod.

On the balance, there's really no doubt about Beyond the Sword. Whether you're a Civilization fan or someone new to the series, you're not playing Civilization IV to its fullest potential unless you're playing it with the Beyond the Sword expansion.

With nearly enough features to qualify as a sequel, this is one expansion you can't pass up.

By: Steve Butts

Sid Meier's Civilization IV has already enjoyed one solid expansion pack, but this week's release of Beyond the Sword brings so much new stuff to the table that it nearly qualifies as a sequel. Adding in a comprehensive new espionage system, a political element to religion, new options for colonies and corporate competition, the expansion energizes an already lively strategy game. Add in improved AI, more combat options, and nearly a dozen scenarios and mods and you've got an expansion that you won't be able to put down for months.''

''As expected, the expansion includes a whole bundle of new toys: leaders, units, buildings, technologies and wonders. The 16 new leaders (and one reshuffle for Rome) almost bring us up to covering all the trait pairings. Some of these new trait pairings make for exciting strategies. Joao's Expansive and Imperialistic traits make him a powerhouse in terms of quick development while Pericles' Creative/Philosophical combination gives him a definite edge in terms of research. There are other combos that are just as interesting, especially when combined with the new unique units and buildings for the new civs.''

''''

''The naval units benefit from some gap filling between galleys and battleships but aside from privateers and ships-of-the-line, most of the new sea units arrive very late in the game. On land, siege engines have been taken down a bit in terms of effectiveness but that just means you'll have to plan your assaults more carefully. Fortunately, by the time you'll start planning tank invasions, you'll have much more mobile artillery and cruise missiles that can keep up with your advances. The new air mission system makes air combat a bit more realistic, but you'll need to worry a little more about land and sea units intercepting your sorties.''

''Firaxis promised us that they'd improved the AI considerably with Beyond the Sword and after playing more than a few games, we have to admit that they've succeeded. Those of us who usually play on Prince have had to step down to Noble just to preserve our pride. Even so, the AI is much better at waging war now in terms of using the right number and mix of units on attack and defense. We've also seen some truly terrifying stacks appear right on our borders with little to no warning. More than once the AI has offered us peace only to gain time to rebuild their army for phase two of the conquest.''

''The espionage system is one of our favorite additions to the series. You can set aside part of your budget each turn for espionage spending against each of your rivals. The more points you spend, the more you'll find out about your rivals and the more opportunities you'll have for your spy units to perform espionage missions. Knowing just what your opponents are researching or being able to investigate their cities whenever you want is a huge benefit.''

''Beyond that, the espionage system allows players an opportunity to really hamper their enemies' success without relying on warfare. In one particularly peaceful game we were several turns away from a space victory when we discovered that the English were going to beat us by winning a cultural victory a few turns sooner. All we had to do was send a few spies down to one of their cities and instruct them to start sabotaging any buildings that were producing culture. Sponsoring a quick city revolt kept them from being able to replace the buildings quickly enough to beat us to victory. Of course, espionage can be a vital arm of your military strategies as well. Throwing a city into revolt just before your forces attack is a nasty surprise for your enemy.

''The best thing about the espionage system is that it works perfectly well for players who don't want to take much of interest in its finer points. Just by adjusting your new espionage slider, you'll accumulate points that will allow you to spy on enemy cities and will increase the cost of their own espionage missions against you. To get the full effect of the new espionage elements, of course, you'll have to tinker with the balances and use your own spy units to perform missions but players can get as involved as little or as much as they want without seriously jeopardizing their success.''

''Ever since the first Civilization was released, fans have been asking for ways to split empires up through war or revolution. While we're still not quite to the point where we're likely to see the Confederate States of Egypt or the People's Republic of Portugal, there's now an option for players to liberate large portions of their empire and make them vassals under the AI's control. The only hitch is that the colony has to be on another continent. You can then liberate individual cities and have them join your existing colonies.''

''Liberating colonies on another continent can definitely help stave off the crippling effects of early expansion but it's also useful to avoid the small maintenance fee that you now incur for any cities you have that aren't located on your home continent. The only real downside to the colony system is that it winds up costing you more in commerce and production than you'll save in maintenance costs. By the time you're ready to develop a substantial overseas colony, you're likely to prepared to produce the courthouses and banks necessary to make it a profitable endeavor.''

''Ultimately, the best argument for creating a colony is that you'll save the time you would otherwise spend managing it. Since the newly liberated colony starts with a significant bias towards you (+10 just for being granted their freedom, plus bonuses for open borders, etc.), you're bound to have a solid vassal for the rest of the game. If you can manage to spin them off so they share your religion, so much the better. This can be particularly useful if you're head of the Apostolic Palace.''

''At first glance, the Apostolic Palace seems like one of the more significant additions but its influence is going to vary quite a bit from game to game. It seems like its overall effectiveness is increased when you have lots of different civs that share your state religion and plenty of war between different religious groups. It works a lot like the United Nations, both in terms of passing resolutions and allowing diplomatic victories, but the resolutions require very specific circumstances so you won't be voting on new measures every few turns like you are with the UN.''

''We like the way that the Palace's powers are balanced. While it's great to be able to declare war against the infidels or to reassign city ownership now and then, the extent of the palace's powers depends on the strength of its members. Of course, the more members you have, the less your own vote will count when passing resolutions. Whatever the extent of its influence, it pays off by adding more interest to the religion system and offering up an earlier (but not easy) shot at a diplomatic victory.''

''We're less happy with the way Corporations work. In their attempts to model the international aspects of modern business, Firaxis have basically turned corporations into offensive weapons you can use to stifle a rival's economy. Much like religions, corporate influence is spread by non-combat units. You'll want to establish branches in other cities to offset the corporation's maintenance cost and to pass some of that cost on to your rivals. In this way, corporate executives become like chain letters or pyramid schemes between cities. Found a business in a rival's territory and he or she will have to screw somebody else in order to make up the penalty.''

''It seems weird that you can cripple an opponent's economy simply by selling them cereal or sushi. We can't argue against the benefits that some corporations provide in terms of resources, but it seems like their maintenance penalty is too severe. Granted, you can always rely on State Property to keep rival companies out of your borders but by the time that's an option you'll probably need the extra health allowed by Environmentalism more than you'll need the gold corporations will cost you.''

''Our only other objection here is the convoluted requirements to establish these companies to begin with. Never mind having to gain access to the right resources and the appropriate technology, the fact that you have to sacrifice a specific kind of Great Person for each corporation you want to build makes the system more complex than is justified by the potential profits. Admittedly, by the time the corporations become available you should be pumping out a regular supply of Great Persons, but as often as not you'll find yourself with an artist or scientist when what you really need is an engineer or a merchant.''

''The last significant change to the core game is the addition of random events. We've already covered a few of our favorites in earlier previews, but the more we play, the more impressed we are that the events seem to reflect the circumstances we're in. Sure, things like hurricanes and plane crashes are a bit unpredictable, but the game capitalizes on religious friction or lengthy wars to come up with some very specific and relevant events. We're also seeing more and more of them that have lasting effects on the productivity of certain tiles or buildings.''

''The Advanced Start is a great feature for players who dislike the slow build of the early game, or for those who begin in a later age with a little more control over their starting position. A point system allows players to purchase cities, cultural influence, units, improvements, techs, buildings and pretty much anything else they want for their empire. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't seem as capable of purchasing a setup that allows for early expansion so if you spend more points on workers than population and also load yourself up with galleys and settlers, you can definitely get out to an early lead.''

''There's not much to talk about in terms of presentation. The new flavored units and buildings add a lot to the visual style of the game, and the new units and leaders are, for the most part, very well done and fit the style of the game nicely. We were definitely disappointed that Leonard Nimoy wasn't used for the new technology quotes. Sid Meier himself provides the new readings but it just isn't the same.''

''Sadly, the game still suffers from some performance problems, particularly towards the end of the game. There are also, not surprisingly, some definite balance problems that need to be addressed. A few of the values need to be tweaked, particularly with regard to the effects of espionage missions in Marathon games. Luckily, it seems like some of this stuff can be solved with some simple number substitutions.''

''Beyond the Sword also ships with a number of scenarios and mods. For us the appeal of the expansion is more in the additions to the core game than in the scripted scenarios or non-historical mods. Nevertheless, there are a number of intriguing mods here that are worth trying even for fans of the vanilla game. Rhye's and Fall's unique historical timeline and civ-specific victory conditions make it a lot of fun for players who want to play a slightly more "realistic" version of Civ, while the Next War mod extends the experience into the otherwise ambiguous realm of Future Tech. Final Frontier is a very attractive mod for those who want to experience Civ in a more Gal Civ style setting. ''

''In terms of scenarios, the appeal here will depend on your tastes. Longtime fans will be happy to see a brand new series World War II scenarios focusing on Europe or the Pacific. It's certainly not for impatient or inattentive types but you have to respect the scale and detail of the scenarios. Things get a little weirder with the game's lone fantasy scenario, Age of Ice, and downright perplexing with the X-COM inspired AfterWorld.''

The Firaxis team redefines "epic" with Beyond the Sword, a massive and amazing expansion pack for Civilization IV.

By: Allen 'Delsyn' Rausch

Making an expansion pack is easy. Cobble together some new units, a few maps, maybe a new campaign, and you've got something to put on shelves while a developer works on their next real project. Making a great expansion pack, though, that's hard. A great expansion pack needs more than just bullet points on the back of the box. It needs to revisit the underpinnings of a game -- explore what makes it tick and then adjust it to make the experience richer without losing what made the game great in the first place. That's a pretty high bar, one that most developers never even try for. Fortunately, Firaxis isn't most developers and Beyond the Sword isn't most expansion packs. It's an amazing addition to an already-brilliant game.

The heart of Beyond the Sword's brilliance lies in three new mechanics. The first is a massive re-working of espionage to make it more integral to the experience. Religion gets a good workover with the new Apostolic Palace and the late game race to the finish line is spiced up by the addition of Corporations. Corporations are best described as a latter-day replacement for religion without all that monkeying-about-with-God stuff. The impact of each of these changes is profound and will throw a wrench into many of the tried-and-true strategies of die-hard Civ players.

One of the biggest -- and doubtlessly most controversial -- additions to the game is the change to Espionage. Spying is now a much more integrated component of the game as espionage itself and agent units now become available after the discovery of the alphabet. More than that, espionage has now become a line item in allocating a civilization's production output -- part of the player's fundamental "guns and butter" decision-making between putting production to work creating wealth, research or culture. The "espionage points" that are produced can be used to empower spy units to perform a variety of functions against other civilization. Spies can poison the wells of an enemy city, for example, steal technology or money, switch a city's religion and even foment unrest. Espionage points also generate passive effects that allow a player to peek into enemy cities and determine what enemy civilizations are building and researching.

The reason espionage will be controversial is because it simply won't be useful to certain kinds of Civilization players. I'm a "peaceful winning" kind of guy. I love building a space ship to go to Alpha Centauri. I live to culture-bomb border cities and stick my tongue out at war-mongers when their citizens like me better and keep joining my empire of joy. I like playing factions off one another, acquiring vassal states and offering covert aide to folks like Tokugawa and Shaka and letting them fight wars for me.

Therefore, I love spies. For players not looking to fight, spies are also insanely useful for disrupting production, fostering unhappiness and unhealthiness in cities and pulling all kinds of dirty tricks that can let them win without firing a shot. The problem is that once the fighting starts, they cease being so useful. They're too easily discovered and killed and their effects just aren't strong enough compared to some of the civics that players can use against them and the amount of resources it takes to run a successful war.

The Apostolic Palace, easily the best new addition to the game, suffers no such imbalances. The palace is a sort of medieval version of the United Nations that makes religion (already a major component of player strategy) the central feature of the game. The Palace (which is based on the structure of the Catholic Papacy) offers players who have at least one city of the Palace's religion the chance to vote on holy edicts such as trade embargoes, forced peace or even declaring holy war amongst all those who share the faith. Players can also use the Palace to win a religious victory by getting all the civilizations in the game to vote for one divine leader. This, by the way, is not an easy thing to do as it requires every civilization in the game to have accepted the Apostolic faith in at least one city and vote for the Palace Resident as ruler of the world.

What makes the Apostolic Palace so much fun is how it shifts the strategic "feel" of the middle game (the Palace is nullified by the invention of Mass Media). In much the way that real-world Popes of the Middle Ages were above yet part of international politics, players who use the Apostolic Palace are forced to consider every action against enemy civilizations in relation to how the Apostolic bloc will feel about it. Going to war against brothers of the faith requires considerably more diplomacy and being a member of a non-Palace religion can get pretty exciting when every member of the bloc decides to declare jihad on you. Peaceful players like me are forced to deal with trade embargoes and keeping good relations with the heathens I've been trading with for badly needed copper when the rest of my co-religionists are champing at the bit for a Crusade. Warriors, on the other hand, will just love being able to gin up said Crusades.

The seven new corporations in the game are Wonders that function in many ways like religions. They're founded by great people units and, for an often-hefty maintenance fee from each city where they have a "branch office," will kick back some great benefits to the civilization that controls them. Since corporations are dependent on resources, they'll often cause a lot of negotiation, horse-trading and diplomatic realignment (not to mention a few brush wars over particular resources). This adds a lot of spice to the end game.

The major problem with these corporations is that getting one is a bit of a crapshoot. Each requires a different type of Great Person and a different set of resources and since each provides a different benefit, that makes them really hard to plan for. If a player can found Civilized Jewelers (which provides a huge boost to culture), that's great, but it doesn't help much in the middle of a protracted modern-day war. Standard Ethanol can be a life-saver for players without oil, but otherwise is just a resource drain.

These three elements alone would be enough to justify the purchase price, but they're far from the only things on offer in Beyond the Sword. While the full laundry list of additions is too long to go into, all of them radically re-shape the game's strategic landscape, usually for the better. The AI seems to have been enhanced, meaning computer-controlled civilizations respond better to tactical situations even at lower difficulty levels. Multiplayer is as much fun as ever and the net code seem much stronger. I found it remarkably easy to get in and out of multiplayer games and the game seems to update much faster, which can cut down on the colossal amount of time larger multiplayer games require.

On the gameplay level, new abilities for forts now actually make these seldom-used elements a viable part of strategic operations. New random events and quests offer a fascinating (and occasionally frustrating) random element to the game that can turn things around on a dime. The game sports a bunch of new civilizations that fill in every combination of leadership characteristics. There are also new units like the anti-tank infantry that can finally blunt that flood of tanks that always seems to crop up the second anyone discovers Industrialism in a multiplayer game. The new Wonders are fun to use and slip so easily into the game it almost feels like they've been there the whole time. For example, I have no idea how I survived earlier games without the Statue of Zeus.

Even mastering these new elements -- by itself a daunting prospect -- still doesn't exhaust everything Beyond the Sword has to offer. Like Warlords, Beyond the Sword offers a number of mods and CivIV conversions to play between rounds of the main game. Some of them were created by the development team, others are polished-up version of popular offerings from the Civilization mod community. The best of the bunch by far is "Final Frontier." This turns Civ IV into a space expansion game not unlike Galactic Civilizations II (though considerably less complex). More than just a redress, "Final Frontier" creates a very different strategic feel with an elegant "Rock, paper, scissors" spaceship combat model that seems inspired by real-time strategy titles.

The other variants available in Beyond the Sword are equally radical modifications and redesigns of the original game. My personal favorite is "Age of Ice," part of the popular "Fall from Heaven" mod series which adds some RPG elements into the game and turns it into one giant puzzle map. That means it's not really replayable, but it sure is fun while it lasts. There are three excellent new WWII scenarios, a "commerce victory" scenario that challenges players to accumulate wealth rather than conquering cities and the "Next War" mod that adds near-future toys like 'Mechs and cloned armies to the end game. The only real clunker of the bunch is "Afterworld" which turns the game into a simplified squad-based tactical game -- though even that mod gets an "A" for effort and major style points for its super-cool comic-book-style opening. There is, of course, the question of paying for stuff available for free on the 'Net, but as those scenarios are such a small part of what the expansion offers, they're more of a bonus than an actual feature.

One of the game's few weaknesses actually stems from its greatest strength -- the sheer amount of content in the expansion. Civilization IV was already a complicated game but the level of complexity (and the resulting need to micromanage) that Beyond the Sword adds is just unbelievable. When fifty-two factors combine with every move a player makes, there's always the possibility that Beyond the Sword might exacerbate the "Dead Game Walking" syndrome in which a player loses the game but doesn't realize until another 200 turns have passed. Civilization IV fans will love it. Heck, I love it, but I eat strategy games with my morning Lucky Charms. If Civilization IV reminds you more of Microsoft's Excel than a fun way to pass the time, Beyond the Sword will do nothing to bring you into the fold.

A bit more problematic is the game's interface, never one of its strong points. With all the new data the game adds, the UI has become a riot of buttons, numbers and symbols throwing a colossal amount of not-very-well-organized information at the player. Want to find out what's going on with the Apostolic Palace? Don't look on the religion information screens where it would make sense. It's under "Victory Conditions" despite the fact that winning an Apostolic Palace victory is by far the most infrequently used function of the Palace. It sure would be nice if my "Corporation Adviser" and the resource trading screen could be found in close proximity since the location of particular resources and who holds them is crucial in managing them. It's not like this level of information can't be managed well. The hyperlinked elegance of the UI in Galactic Civilizations II is one the Civilization IV team would do well to study.

In the end such complaints are far, far outweighed by the sheer amount of awesome content available in Beyond the Sword. It's easy to imagine a "gilding the lily" scenario where just throwing random additions into the game threw off one of the most elegant strategic titles currently available today. That the Civilization IV team didn't do this and instead gave us some great new additions to the game is remarkable in itself. That these additions make the experience deeper and richer and way more fun can be considered nothing less than a "Wonder."

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