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Prepare yourself...
By Aureole & Bog
Defcon is a game for anyone who lay awake during the eighties paranoid about nuclear war. It poses the problem "what would I do
in the case of nuclear war", and answers it thus: "boil". And indeed, the manual of Defcon and the load screens do go into astonishing detail about
exactly how you'll die. The game doesn't really try to go for po-faced seriousness or irreverent gallows humour with the subject. It doesn't need to.
You can’t fight in here: this is the war room.
The DEFCON clock starts ticking down as soon as the game starts. There's no politics or any reason given, nor any hope of a last minute
reprieve - that's someone else's problem. The charm of the game is in its abstraction. From the attractive pseudo-vector graphics and minimalist soundtrack,
the layout is effective and does the job well. As to what their job is, well, within a few minutes of playing, you're drawn straight into the
insane logic that infuses the game - it's too late to win, but can you lose the least? As submarines shuttle silently off the shoreline and you weigh
the pros and cons of an all-out attack vs defending your resources for a
late-game flurry, you're drawn into the game aspects. Seeing those sudden white boils and "SAN FRANCISCO HIT - 18.2M DEAD" is a shock. But then,
it's also a rush - seeing fusion acne breaking out across your opponent's territory can bring out the air-punching "woot!" response, even
for reducing a country with a population of billions to radioactive slag.
Go get 'em Mom
That's the thing about the game though: in some respects it’s really a glorified board game. More specifically, a game of Risk
gone horribly right. Or rather, it’s a board game that runs in real time rather than turn taking, with a mechnic that would be impossible on a board
game and with considerably more complicated rules. And half the skill is arcade-style timing trying to get everything done in time. So not at all
like a board game, come to think of it. Or maybe it’s what board games were always striving to be.
Synchronising a strike so your subs, your bombers, and your ICBMs all saturate a country's defenses simultaneously is a bit like
thermonuclear feng shui. And there’s the pleasing rock-paper-scissors mechanic of the units: carrier beats sub, battleship beats carrier and so forth.
It’s not a flat-out war sim though. The game flows quickly: place units, scout, and then sit back and wait. Everything is in the timing of when and
who you launch against. It's a constant temptation to launch too soon. You want to see the missile traces, and there's always the thought that you
could just flatten someone and whip back to air-defence mode in time to interdict the opposition's fire. It's a very human game and playing versus
an AI is just fundamentally unsatisfying. The starkness of the game calls for the human element, even if it's just a stream of swearing over the
built-in IRC client.
Even when Defcon 1 is reached, it's a case of waiting for the other person to break, as the last person to fire generally has
more options. But not always. And that's brilliant.
My god, it’s full of stars.
Defcon is available exclusively via download direct from Introversion or by Steam. Which is just as well since the whole point
of the game is playing against real people, preferably friends and the more the better. The allegiances and the sudden but inevitable betrayals, the
sky full of stars and every star a vaporising city. Go download it now: for the price, it’d be a warcrime not to.
October 2006
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