PC Game Review

Crysis Warhead Review

2008-10-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

All of the claims you may have heard that Crysis could only run on nuclear-powered supermachines were greatly exaggerated. But if for some reason you worry that this stand-alone companion to the ultragorgeous first-person shooter will bring your PC to its knees, you should know that it's highly scalable and ran smoothly on a number of machines during our testing. It also looks better, with clear attention given to the game's artistic sensibilities and the lusher, denser environments. But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine. Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

If you didn't play Crysis, Warhead's story may be initially confusing, given that you hit the ground running with little exposition. You play as Sergeant "Psycho" Sykes, the brash Brit who was a bit player in the original game. Psycho tends to play by his own rules, always willing to ignore orders and jump into the fray if that's what the situation requires. The story runs parallel to the events of Crysis, though his strident attitude--and a dramatic cutscene near the end of the game--definitely make this Psycho's tale, even if the actual plot remains the same. In any case, you and your US Special Forces team are investigating a tropical island besieged by North Korean invaders. However, your greatest menace comes in the form of aggressive aliens that turn the luxuriant jungles and glowing beaches into a frozen wasteland. You and your teammates, clad in nanosuits that grant you special abilities such as super strength, temporary cloaking, super speed, and additional armor, confront both threats across a variety of large environments.

Psycho's brazen confidence does more than just establish a gutsy protagonist: It sets the stage for a more focused and intense series of battles that keep the pace moving more smoothly than before. Warhead still offers some of the same kind of sandbox levels, but thoughtful enemy placement and map bottlenecks keep downtime to a minimum. You can approach assaults on beachfronts and Korean encampments in a number of ways, so if you're a stealth enthusiast, you can employ your suit's cloak setting and sneak in, or attach a silencer to your sniper rifle and take out your human foes from a distance. If you would rather employ hit-and-run tactics, you can jump into the heat of battle, cause a ruckus, and use your suit's speed function to zoom away. However, Warhead is clearly focused on the guns-blazing approach, gently nudging you into full-on encounters with its mission objectives, character dialogue, and level design. When you reach primary and secondary destinations, you'll get besieged by large numbers of enemies, both human and (later on) alien. Given that human foes also don nanosuits, they're not necessarily quick to fall; as a result, these sequences are exciting and challenging, and you'll need to use your suit abilities and cover opportunities to your advantage. The easily triggered explosions of enemy vehicles and hazardous barrels further intensify these pockets of activity.

A number of set-piece battles confirm this slight shift toward action-packed mayhem. Your first encounter with a hulking alien war machine may not have the same impact as a similar one in Crysis, but it happens earlier than you'd expect, and it establishes the alien presence with adrenaline-fueled drama. That battle is a wonder, as is a later defensive mission that has you fending off a series of aliens, and requires you to shift focus frequently and use every weapon in your inventory. Another great sequence is a train level that, at first, seems much like similar sequences in a number of other shooters. You can stay on the train and use turrets to gun down the opposition, as expected--but you can also jump off and engage the opposition at any time, giving even this near-cliche sequence plenty of replay value. A linear journey through an underground mine is the obvious misstep in regard to level design, given that it never so much as hints at the open-ended action that makes Warhead a superb shooter.

If you played only that level, you also wouldn't see the host of improvements that power the action, particularly the improvements to alien artificial intelligence. The general design means that these robotic rivals will occasionally still be floating around above you, but they have more obvious smarts now, and they find ways to pummel you with ice pellets while remaining just out of sight, staying on the move, and using cover more often. Human enemies also seem more aware of their surroundings, flank you more often, and activate their nanosuits' armor to minimize damage. They also use the limited visibility that the jungle affords them quite well, hiding in brush to stay just out of sight. There are some remaining problems, particularly if you take potshots from a distance. Occasionally, the AI won't react when you snipe at an enemy, and foes using turrets will sometimes let you walk right up behind them. On the whole, however, Warhead makes clear improvements over the original in this regard, which in turn makes for better combat overall.

Vehicles feel sturdy, which is just as well, because you'll be driving them often, either to cover ground more quickly, or just to take pleasure in mowing down enemies with your mounted weapons. You can have a good deal of fun blazing a trail through the jungle while showering your foes with steel death, and the destructible environments further exaggerate the devastation. A scene in which you speed across the tundra in a hovercraft is done particularly well, offering a good sense of speed but pushing you into enemy hotbeds, giving you the chance to stop and fight or zip away with a quick glimpse of Koreans riddling aliens with bullets.

The improved vehicle handling is also noticeable on one of the new multiplayer maps, on which two teams battle in--and out of--the tanks and helicopters scattered about. This is good stuff, and it showcases Warhead's new Team Instant Action mode, a mode noticeably missing from the original Crysis. It's just good old Team Deathmatch, but it's done well, and the maps are improvements on those of the original. Snipers are still a threat, but the size of the maps are better suited to deathmatch battles, and more thought and care seem to have gone into small but important factors, such as weapon-cache placements and player spawns. The Instant Action and Power Struggle modes are still accounted for, and many of the original maps return, offering a large suite of online options that make online Warhead combat more appealing than its predecessor. Note that unlike Crysis, the expansion requires the online component to be installed separately, and isn't accessible from the single-player game.

Both online and off, Warhead is a beauty. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. A test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Don't overlook the improved art design, though, which surpasses the original's oft-sterile look thanks to several striking vistas, such as one featuring an icy naval vessel stranded in the frozen tundra. The audio is almost as terrific. Various creaks and groans make heading down a narrow glacial pathway all the more harrowing, and weapons sound appropriately powerful. The voice acting is strong, and the understated soundtrack sets the right tone without ever getting in the way.

Warhead's single-player campaign should take you no more than six hours or so to complete, but not only does it invite multiple play-throughs, it costs only $30--and doesn't require you to own the original. In other words, there is no reason why anyone with a capable PC shouldn't play Crysis Warhead. It's more focused, it's more intense, and though it doesn't provide as much of the sandbox feel as Crysis veterans would wish for, it still delivers on every other front. Play this game.

Sam & Max: Season 2 Review

2008-09-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

Santa going postal, staking an emo vampire, and taking the Soul Train to hell are just a few of the insane moments crammed into Telltale Games' absolutely hilarious Sam & Max Season Two. This outstanding compilation pulls together the last five episodes in the ongoing adventure series starring Sam, a McGruff-style dog sporting a suit and fedora, and Max, a murderous, smelly rabbit. Most fans have probably already played these games, as they have been released online over the past year, but if you missed these games when they were first released, the low price and ton of extras make this collection worth the purchase price.

Welcome to hell. It's sort of like a fiery IRS office, so bureaucrats would love being condemned to this place.

Anyone who loves classic adventures will have a great time with these surreal, zany shorts. Sam and Max fashion themselves as "freelance police," private detectives who get into one zany mess after another while trying to solve crimes in a zany cartoon world. This means that all of the tales here are laugh-out-loud funny, yet also dark and more than a bit disturbing. You should probably just enjoy the pop-culture jokes riffing on everything from The Exorcist to The Mod Squad and skip putting too much thought into the delightfully twisted minds who came up with the game's bizarre yarns.

But the puzzles themselves aren't as off the wall as the insane stories of the adventures included here. Your tasks are generally based on common-sense logic, even though the end goals deal with nutso objectives like exorcising Santa Claus, figuring out what Charles Lindbergh and D.B. Cooper are doing as babies on Easter Island, and checking out the absurdly bureaucratic Hell LLC. There is a structure to everything that Sam and Max do, so you don't have to fool around with nonsensical adventure game logic or collect a bunch of worthless junk to use at some future date. Tasks are always focused around picking up just a couple of key objects and using them in the right places, nifty conversation trees with consequences to each dialogue choice, and arcade minigames where you do things like box rats and race cars. Everything flows along at a great pace, and your duties are mixed up so that you never get bored with one style of puzzle. Even if you do get a little weary of the sheer strangeness of everything, machine gun pop-culture jokes about the real world keep you grounded and laughing. The biggest design issue is too much backtracking, in that you have to frequently drive back and forth between episode locales and Sam and Max's home office and surrounding neighborhood to solve quests.

The look and sound of the missions are striking. Visuals are done in a Saturday-morning-cartoon style, with lots of bright kiddie colors blended with sharp edges. Everything is just a bit askew, like you're viewing Sam and Max's world through a funhouse mirror. Style is everywhere, right down to the opening and closing credits of each episode. The only drawback to the visuals is the camera angle, which is a little too close to the action in many scenes and can't be manually rotated past its on-rails 2D position to look all around the 3D landscape. Audio effects are dead-on, from the restrained insanity of Max's voice to the 8-bit arcade music played whenever you have to deal with the obsolete computers that operate the Pimplecar Garage.

Elmo would not be amused. You have to presume that the Sesame Street copyright lawyers wouldn't be, either, although nobody's fired off a cease-and-desist letter yet.

And when you finish up the adventures themselves, you can check out the extras that make this compilation something of a director's-cut version of the original download-only games. Over four hours of audio commentary are included, along with the "Sam & Max Nearly Save Christmas" cartoon short and a bunch of random collectibles such as trailers, outtakes, and concept art. None of this is absolutely essential, and the Christmas short is already available free online, but taken altogether you've got a sizable grab bag of extra goodies for collectors.

The only disappointment in Sam & Max Season Two is that it ends too soon and leaves you wanting more. Each episode can be played through in just a couple of hours, although you would be best advised to drag out the experience and check out everything you can click on for the extra laughs. This series is a great example of how much creativity, intelligence, and humor can still be poured into this classic genre. So, bring on season three.

Dracula 3: Path of the Dragon Review

2008-09-13T17:54:00.000-07:00

Dracula again? Vampire fatigue is a legitimate feeling that you might encounter when ripping open the shrink-wrap of Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon, given that it seems like Bram Stoker's infamous creature of the night has already been the focus of a lot of adventure games. This latest one, the third in a franchise that started nearly a decade ago with Dracula: Resurrection and Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, doesn't bring much new to the table. Developer Kheops Studio sticks to the ancient adventure-gaming formula that it has specialized in with previous releases such as Return to Mysterious Island and Voyage, and spins a dull yarn in which you research the biggest bloodsucker of them all in 1920s Transylvania. Busywork puzzles and stone-age visuals further drain the rest of the creeps out of this supposedly scary saga, which unfolds more like an uninspired detective story than an ominous encounter with a legendary monster.

No Dracula-inspired game would be complete without a spooky grave.

The plot isn't what you would expect from a Dracula-inspired game, although you can't characterize that as a good thing. For a change, you don't play Van Helsing or any of his descendants. Instead, you take the role of Father Arno Moriani, a priest sent to Transylvania by his bosses at the Vatican to investigate a recently deceased Romanian doctor who has been declared a candidate for canonization. The good father soon finds out that the doctor held some odd views regarding a number of strange deaths in the village, and he finds his assignment quickly changed from sainthood vetting to disproving the existence of vampires. So you spend most of your time undertaking scientific research and questioning professors, not tracking down Dracula and his pointy-toothed pals. More time is spent with test tubes than with stakes, and you don't actually encounter any vampires until the very end of the game.

Another novelty involves moving the setting from the stereotypical Victorian age to the 1920s, when Romania was still reeling from the devastation caused by World War I. This doesn't make for many differences when it comes to gameplay, although shifting the game into the 20th century does allow for more-varied artwork involving semimodern touches such as telephones, trains, electric lights, and chemistry equipment. However, the overall visual quality is fairly poor, despite good use of shadows and fog effects to create a spooky mood. Most scenes are grainy, and character models are afflicted with slow-motion movement tics that makes it seem like everybody you meet is underwater. Voice samples often sound vaguely slurred in a rather similar fashion, lending a surreal vibe to many conversations that actually enhances the eerie nature of your investigations.

Gameplay offers some similarly unwelcome surprises, at least after you get past all of the "Brand X" stuff. Dracula 3 is dry, traditional, and stilted. Nevertheless, there is one big changeup here in regard to puzzles. The designers chose to move away from cliched vampire plot devices and play up a more modern "It's the 20th century--there are no such things as vampires!" vibe that apparently seeks to explain bloodsucker fear as mere peasant legend. This is a nice switcheroo from the standard stake-the-fanged-guy credulity that usually accompanies any game about Dracula. But it's also pretty disingenuous in that you know from the very beginning that Father Arno won't be discovering that vampires are just make-believe after all. That would have been a cool surprise after all of the buildup about Vlad Tepes, neck hematomas, and weird blood disorders, but it's hard to pull back from supernatural explanations when you've got Dracula rising from his coffin on the cover of the game. So the story eventually goes right where you see it heading from the beginning, despite the lame attempts to fake you out.

Drawing blood in such an antiseptic fashion isn't what you expect in a game supposedly about hunting down vampires.

Such an approach to the story also, ahem, bleeds a lot of the gothic-horror atmosphere out of the game's gloomy rooms and foggy street scenes. Puzzles seem more often based on science than superstition. At times, it feels like you're more of a Sherlock Holmes than a priest, with only the ability to flip open a Bible to read inspirational quotes reminding you that this protagonist wears a collar and a crucifix around his neck. You even walk step by boring step through scientific experiments at a couple of points; for example, you're forced to wade through the amazingly tedious process required to draw your own blood and then do tests for type and other issues with multiple blood samples. It's all a bit much, especially when the procedures are so true to life that you actually have to wash your hands a few times. Other types of set-piece logic puzzles are more appropriate to a horror setting in that they involve broken artifacts, ancient tomes, drawing pentagrams, and so forth. Yet even these brainteasers are cumbersome and time-consuming. Considering that these puzzles generally aren't difficult to figure out, you're not solving mysteries as much as you are tediously filling in the blanks until the game lets you proceed.

Adventure gamers with a taste for methodical puzzle-solving could appreciate Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon, whereas everybody else will be too busy stifling yawns to feel any chills running down their spines. This is a vampire-inspired adventure by the numbers that holds few surprises in its dry puzzles and dated presentation values.

Brothers in Arms

2008-09-13T17:52:00.000-07:00

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway looks set to carve a niche for itself in the overcrowded World War II genre. But Ubisoft and Gearbox's insistence on qualifying its historical accuracy is becoming rather jarring. We were recently invited to central London to meet veterans of Operation Market Garden, the battle that features prominently in the game. The ex-servicemen offered their personal take on their involvement in the turning point of the second world war, which was both fascinating and moving to hear. The problem is that the game wants it both ways--it clearly wants to honour the soldiers, but it can't help glamourising the act of war itself.

Covering and flanking are at the heart of combat in Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.

Take the first level, for example, where we managed to score a headshot on an unlucky German. The camera moves from the first-person perspective toward a third-person view of your victim, at which point the directors of The Matrix take over and frame the blood-splattering, cranium-popping spectacle in painstaking slow-motion detail. On the second level, the same viewpoint is used to highlight the damage of a grenade as the explosion sent the limbs of two soldiers spiraling off in every angle.

If you're not surrounded by war vets, though, Hells Highway looks like it will be a more entertaining experience. The game has great cinematics with the obligatory Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan cinematography, while the excellent tutorial mission eases you into the game's cover-based combat system. It's heavily based on the "find, fix, flank, finish" combat style actually employed during the war, which means you have to pin your enemy down and then attack from a different angle to finish him off. You can use your teammates in either the fixing or flanking role, but you need to fire at the enemy until the red circle above his head turns gray to indicate he's been pinned down.

We got to fight alongside two different sets of teams during the first four levels--regular assault squads that use rifles and a bazooka squad for more explosive support. Both teams are easy to command--you hold down the left trigger to pull up a cursor and then point to where you want them to go. If you point at enemies, they'll start firing automatically, but if you try to send them somewhere dangerous, they'll automatically take cover and fend for themselves. On one occasion, our bazooka squad simply refused to pop out from around a corner to fire at our target, but otherwise, the system seemed to work just fine.

The game has a gritty, realistic visual style and features some stylishly directed cut-scenes.

One standout feature is the destructible cover, which really comes into its own at the beginning of the fourth level. You can hide behind fences, but the wooden planks break apart under rifle fire, so you need to keep moving. Sandbags are a more solid defense, but they can be completely destroyed with a direct hit from rocket fire. There's no health system per se, but if you're out of cover your comrades will tell you you're in a vulnerable position, and the screen goes red if you become too exposed.

Adding to the violence we talked about earlier, Brothers in Arms features some fairly adult themes. Your AI teammates argue or bicker, and we even heard a couple of strong expletives in the cutscenes. While using a windmill as a lookout point, we saw a young farm girl being dragged into a barn. When we got back down to the ground and went to investigate, we saw how she'd been strung up by the German forces and left to die. There was also a moment when we headed into town to be greeted by a vicar, only to see him get shot by the advancing Germans shortly after.

The graphics in Hell's Highway are impressive, with faces that are visibly scarred from battle, as well as character models that are detailed right down to the dirty fingernails and scratched-up equipment. One of the coolest ideas was the achievements system, which is based on the Kilroy illustrations that real soldiers made in World War II. Bored American infantrymen inscribed drawings on the side of buildings to show that they'd been there, and you can earn achievement points by finding them hidden around the levels.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway looks like an interesting new take on the FPS genre. The game has been in development for a while, during which time many other World War II shooters have made it to market. However, the cover dynamics and team play differentiate it from such series as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. We've also yet to see the multiplayer game, which we hope will add longevity to the single-player experience. The game is due for release on the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on September 26.

Outcry

2008-09-13T17:50:00.001-07:00

Adventure gamers looking for something off the beaten path get more than they bargain for in Outcry. This point-and-click exercise in the surreal from Russian developer Phantomery Interactive is certainly a step removed from the norm, but it's also so relentlessly strange and impenetrable that it's nearly impossible to play. Style has been elevated over substance in every aspect of the design, resulting in a trippy game that's appealing only for its bizarre atmosphere, philosophical pretensions, and striking visuals.

Even the basic storyline is tough to figure out, because you're given little to go on. The game begins with the anonymous protagonist (you have to check the manual to find out that you're a "middle-aged writer") receiving a letter from his estranged brother. Apparently your brother is a scientist working on a "paramount experiment that unlocks new horizons of human cognition" and involves getting "in precise sync with inner frequencies." The letter he sends you is tangled and nonsensical, and it hurls you into the game knowing precisely zip about what you're supposed to be doing. Getting the news that your brother has disappeared is the only part of the game's opening that is the slightest bit understandable. Various documents and recordings left around his abandoned residence seem to indicate that his experiment involved ancient megaliths, time travel, checking out alternate dimensions, separating human consciousness from the body, coming up with a recipe for really great salsa...that sort of thing. You eventually uncover a grab bag of goofiness about ancient secrets and the nature of reality. Still, none of it really connects. Either something was lost in the translation from the original Russian, or the storyline was just too New Agey in the first place.

Searching for a missing relative may be one of the oldest adventure cliches, but this Acme brand plot has never been presented in quite this fashion.

What the game loses in lucidity it gains in an inspired presentation. Outcry's visuals are downright hallucinogenic. Every scene is overlaid with an aging filter loaded with dark sepia tones, skips, a main light source that dims and shines like a strobe effect, and other film flaws that make it seem as though you're viewing a long-lost movie reel. Some scenes are even in black and white. Because this layer is placed between your first-person perspective and the backdrops of the adventure, everything seems like a dream or an old memory. Nothing establishes a particular time or place, either. Everything around you is decrepit--one of the first things you see in your brother's house is an old gramophone--but it's hard to say for sure what year it is despite references to the early 20th century, such as notes mentioning Sigmund Freud's "new" theories. The rooms are so dingy and the machinery is so rusted that they appear to have been abandoned centuries ago. It could be yesterday, it could be 1920, or it could be who knows when, which is an unsettling notion that goes hand in hand with the surreal story to keep you off-kilter throughout the game.

Poorly presented puzzles also keep you off balance, though not in a good way. The game mixes traditional adventure puzzles involving collecting and combining items with set-piece logic brain-twisters where you twirl valves, pull levers, and crack codes, but there is zero feedback provided for your efforts. It's nearly impossible to determine if you're on the right track, because the protagonist never says a word and the interface doesn't offer up any information about your surroundings. There's no indication that you've solved a puzzle, and when you click valves or levers into the right position you never receive "You've done it!" triggers like green flashing lights or the noise of a door opening in the distance. Instead, to check on your progress, you have to run off to see if the door has opened, the water has been turned on, the stairs have moved into place, and so forth. Not fun.

Interacting with objects is just as frustrating. Items that can be picked up look exactly the same as those that form part of the immobile scenery. Pixel hunts are necessary in every location you visit, and it's extra tedious here because those stylish, old-timey visuals make everything so dark and grimy that it's almost impossible to spot everything during your first run-through. You constantly find yourself backtracking to pick up objects that you have overlooked. Even worse, many items cause the cursor to change to indicate that they can be interacted with in some way, but they don't actually do anything. In the usual adventure game, such situations often provoke a quip from the hero indicating what you need to do to use the object in question. Here, though, nothing happens at all. There are no comments from the mute protagonist and no text tips from the game itself.

One example of this can be found early in the second chapter when you're trying to assemble the scattered pieces of a key. The last piece is right in front of you in one scene, and it looks like you can simply reach out and grab it. But when you try to do so, nothing happens. There is no note that you can't quite reach the component and no suggestion that you need a little help. So good luck determining that you need to take an apparently unrelated item from elsewhere in the level, lock it in a vise, bend it with a hammer into the shape of a hook, and then use this impromptu tool to grab the key part. You're always left to muddle through on your own, which is often impossible without help from a walk-through or a gang of similarly befuddled adventure gamers on a forum.

Reading books and diaries is expected in adventure games--although nobody wants to sign on for pretentious philosophizing and botany.

Clues are present, although they tend to be buried in the text-heavy diaries, random scraps of paper, and academic textbooks that your brother left scattered all over the place. This forces you to wade through a ton of dull science-speak about everything from botany to ancient megaliths. Just about everything is written in an awkward style, and the diary entries are accompanied by stilted spoken dialogue read phonetically by someone whose sole experience with English seems to have been watching Simpsons reruns on Moscow Channel 4. These sections are so annoying that they distract you from reading the lines on your own. Thankfully, you can ditch them by turning off the sound effects (you lose everything this way, not just the vocals, although this isn't much of a sacrifice since the game is almost silent) and just leaving on the moody, piano-heavy musical score.

Outcry is weird with a capital "W," as thick with atmosphere as a snowy night in St. Petersburg, deeply pretentious, and mind-bogglingly incomprehensible. Like a piece in one of its own puzzles, you can pick Outcry up, but good luck figuring out what to do with it.

2008-09-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing settlers learned as they colonized the New World, it's that you always need a little help from your friends. Be it in the form of corn-farming lessons from the natives or an extra shipment of supplies from the homeland, a helping hand could ensure survival through a harsh winter in a strange new land. With that in mind, Civilization IV: Colonization is a strategy game more focused on trade and forging new alliances than it is about wiping out natives and competing colonies with musket fire.

We learned this lesson playing a LAN multiplayer match of Colonization this week. In addition to traditional LAN play and online modes, there's a direct IP connection, a hot seat mode in which multiple players take their turns on the same computer, and a slower-paced play-by-e-mail mode for those who don't have four hours to spare for the quick game. Yes, that's four hours for a quick game.

The American city DudeFest stood no chance against the cannons of New France.

We took control of Samuel de Champlain set off in hopes of establishing a fruitful French colony, and quickly began construction on Quebec in the Southern Hemisphere. The Cherokee and the Arawak tribes were both located in close proximity, but gifts of rum and tools kept them happy neighbors. Keeping the natives happy, you'll quickly learn, is of immense importance in Colonization. What their villages lack in technology is offset by the huge combat advantage braves have in the forests, swamps, and hills. Building too closely to their villages is the easiest way to start a costly war that, early on in the game as you don't have many guns, you will lose.

It's wasn't long before we ran into a village belonging to the English—controlled by another player. The city was low on resources, and it was the hope of that player that founding near our border would stymie our nation’s growth. In a way, this worked, because as it turns out, you can place citizens in your city’s town hall to increase patriotism. This caused the small borders of the city to expand so that several production squares in our city, Montreal, were cut off.

At the same time in the far north, another of our opponents, playing as the Dutch, was growing his holdings at a tremendous pace. The Dutch begin the game with advantages in trade, such as the Merchantman ship class from the opening of the match, and the colonies' treasury was filling quickly by trading raw silver and fur coats. However, we did commission a privateer unit to start raiding these wealthy Dutch ships for their goods. Privateers sail without their nation's colors, so they can attack without declaring war. Utilizing privateers in multiplayer is a fun way to pester your opponents without entering a costly war.

By building up your resources early in the game, you can focus on weapons production later during the endgame. Early on it seems the best strategy is to offer open trade borders to your counterparts, even building an alliance when your king eventually sends its expeditionary force after you when you declare independence.

With France’s skilled lumberjacks and carpenters, we constructed new buildings at a rapid pace. With expert iron ore miners, blacksmiths, and gunsmiths, tools and weapons became widely available through our domain. In another of our nearby cities, we ordered pioneers to improve the land by building lodges, mines, farms, and roads--this increases the amount of resources produced, and also decreases the time it takes to transport goods overland via wagon train. The French faction seems to have the ability to build a powerful economy indeed--we were also able to commission expert silver miners to producing staggering amounts of the precious metal. We then shipped the silver back to our home nation of France to purchase elder statesman and master tobacconists. Elder statesmen in city hall increase production of liberty bells that increase rebel sentiment--necessary to declare independence from your home nation later in the game--as well as increase the size of territory belonging to your nation. When your nation possesses enough influence--especially when you commission such powerful helpers to your cause--your borders can eventually come to surround several Native American villages. In this case, the chiefs of the villages we surrounded offered the settlements as gifts to our cause and relocated to the west. Tobacconists, naturally, produce tasty cigars that can be sold in Europe for a tidy profit

Over time, we developed our colony and attracted powerful founding father characters like Patrick Henry and Martha Washington. However, we remained mindful of the number of turns we had remaining in the game, since the ultimate goal of the game is to build your fledgling settlements into a nation that’s powerful enough to fight off the advances of your home country and declare independence. In fact, this end game provides the most difficulty in Colonization. As rebel sentiment in our colonies grew, the king of our home nation of France added soldiers, artillery, and warships to his expeditionary forces. We found our own forces to be woefully inadequate in comparison, but rebel sentiment in our colonies had eclipsed 50 percent. Rebel sentiment increases over time as your home nation levies more and more usurious taxes from your overworked colonists. In our case, the tax rate soared to 25 percent and our elder statesmen finally clamored for revolution.

And so, we declared our independence in the game year of 1755 and formed a new nation. When you take this bold step in Colonization, you must draft a constitution that declares a decisive direction for your new nation. This includes whether or not your nation will allow for slavery, whether it will subscribe to the belief of Manifest Destiny (versus rights for the natives), and whether you wish to have separation of church and state (versus a theocracy). Each of these decisions offer a variety of bonuses. For instance, you’ll have more production if you adopt slavery, but you have increased combat strength if every man is created equal. After crafting the constitution, our citizens were ready for a new beginning without taxes and tyranny. They were ready for a new country. And in the game year of 1762, just seven turns later, they were squashed flat

Insert elder statesmen in town hall to expand your borders.

What separates Colonization from other strategy games is that it’s really two games in one. 90 percent of the game is spent cultivating resources, building cities, and increasing rebel sentiment. The final turns are devoted to smashing the king's ground troops in order to claim independence. If you don’t develop a strong enough economy with a proud enough nation of people, you’ll never muster up a strong enough army. And if you don’t have a strong enough army, the government of your parent country will crush you. As we saw, this can be a tougher task in a multiplayer game where you not only have to contend with your greedy home nation’s king and his outrageous taxes, but also with rival players looking to carve out the New World in their images. However, the game’s multiplayer mode can accommodate as many as eight players total, and two players can cooperatively control a single colony. In any case, from what we can tell, Colonization will offer an intriguing and engrossing multiplayer experience if you and your friends can spare the time. The game is scheduled to ship later this month