Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a review of a classic

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Grade: A
Platform: Windows, Mac
Genre: 4X
GOG $5.99


Easily one of the best 4X games ever developed, available at GOG now for only six bucks, if you haven't played it yet just stop reading and go buy it and you'll easily spend a couple hundred hours playing before you realize it.

Or, if you insist there is more to say in review.

Positioned as a sort of thematic or conceptual sequel to the starship victory in the Civilization series, Alpha Centuri follows the colonists to their new home where they promptly split into ideology driven, as opposed to nationalist or ethnic, factions and start competing for dominance.

It plays largely like other games in the Civilization family tree, the most obvious mechanical difference being that unlike most other Civ games you can design individual units rather than just getting a default unit with certain tech advances.  But there is more to the difference than the obvious, some of the mechanics are significantly different from Civilization's model, and often better.  Alpha Centauri has a dynamic weather system and you can use terraforming to not only help your own society but to hurt your enemies.  Change rainfall patterns to make their crops wither, or even flood them via global warming.  The tech tree is improved as well and has an option for blind research that adds an interesting element to the game.

But what sets Alpha Centauri apart from the Civilization series is not just setting or tone, or even the mechanical differences, but the fact that Alpha Centauri has a story and characters.  The characters are developed mainly as you climb the tech tree or build wonders, each tech or wonder has a quote that is usually from one of the faction leaders and helps breathe life both into their faction and the leader themselves.  The story develops as you play, both in alterations to gameplay and in small text vignettes.

The planet, simply called Planet, is inhabited by life that's alien beyond even starfish aliens.  The dominant life form is a fungus, simply called xenofungus or "the fungus", and all the other life you encounter is deeply related to and basically part of the fungus.  The fungus is also telepathic and pre-sapient when you first encounter it, but grows into a person, a single mind, as it spreads over the planet.

At first the fungus is an obstruction, worthless in terms of resources, slowing down your units, and acting as a hiding place for mind worms which are exactly as awful as they sound; the discovery of fungicidal add ons for your terraformers seems like the best thing ever.  As you progress you can learn how to make the fungus the most valuable resource in the game, you'll be carpeting your territory with as much as you can manage and you'll curse your earlier efforts to get rid of it.

Alpha Centauri takes a decidedly transhumanist approach to things, allowing cybernetics, genetic engineering, brain mapping and upload, and more.  All of which fits the game perfectly and helps propel the story to its natural conclusion.

Each faction is clear, has advantages and disadvantages that fit its ideology, an agenda that makes sense given that ideology, and they will react to you based on your social decisions as well as your more overt diplomatic or warmaking decisions.  The AI isn't especially amazing, but it does a good enough job of providing a challenge.

In addition to the quality writing for the factions and the storyline in general, Alpha Centauri features well done voice acting for each faction leader that helps make them memorable.  The rich rolling voice of CEO Nwabudike Morgan helps establish him as the sort of person who despises most of humanity but makes a pretense of caring about the little people, while Sister Miriam Godwinson speaks with a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle), but threatening, air of conviction and righteousness.

If it weren't for the overarching story, the rich world building, the well developed factions, and the integration of transhumanist themes, Alpha Centauri would simply have been Civilization with different art assets (looking at you Civilization: Beyond Earth) and we'd have long forgotten it.  As it is, it stands out not merely as a well done member of the Civilization family, but also as one of the better 4X games yet developed.  This shows that it is possible to incorporate a story and characters into the 4X genre, and that if done well it can make the game vastly better.

It holds up very well, both in terms of graphics and gameplay.  Despite being 17 years old  the gameplay is still fresh (which says something not at all hopeful about the 4X genre, which seems to be stagnating) and the game entertaining and challenging.

The only expansion for the game, Alien Crossfire, is a mixed bag.  The alien factions are interesting enough, and obviously thought went into trying to make them alien, but the extra human factions mostly seemed cheap and lazy compared to the original factions, a couple stood out as worthwhile but mostly they were bleh. Mostly it is worthwhile for the gameplay improvements, the addition of fungal towers we very good, and some of the added tech improves the game greatly. Fortunately it is possible to use the improvements of the add on without bothering with the somewhat inferior factions it included.

The combination of a fresh take on the 4X genre, the well executed world building, the addition of personalities, characters, and story to the 4X genre, all combine to make Alpha Centauri a game truly worthy of an A.

War For the Overworld

War for the Overworld
Grade: C-
Platform: PC, Mac, GNU/Linux
Genre: 4X
Site
Steam

War for the Overworld is really Dungeon Keeper 3, it can't be called that for copyright and trademark reasons, but it's DK3.

And that's both good and bad.  Hardcore DK fans like me have been clammoring for DK3 ever since DK2 was released, so it seems a bit churlish to give it a less than stellar rating when it finally does get released.  But I've got my reasons.

WftO has a lot going for it, to begin with they got Richard Ridings the original voice actor for the mentor from DK1 and DK2 to voice this game as well, and his silky yet sinister tone was always one of the little joys of playing Dungeon Keeper.  The WftO designers also must have been working hand in glove with the legal team to skirt as closely as possible to violating the trademarks and copyrights on Dungeon Keeper without actually stepping over the line. It looks like Dungeon Keeper, it feels like Dungeon Keeper, it sounds like Dungeon Keeper. 

So why a C- instead of a C or a C+?

A variety of reasons, beginning with poor support for post-campaign play.  There is a not very well designed sandbox mode, the inevitable PvP mode, and the promise, or perhaps threat, of DLC in the future.  Compare to DK2's rich post-campaign play and it doesn't hold up.

There's also the problem that while they did innovate a bit, much of what they came up with was mediocre at best.  I did like some changes.  The mana pool is better managed than it was in DK2, they made mana regenerate at a flat rate and took out the abuse inviting mechanic of allowing prayers in the temple to generate mana.  I honestly think DK was better without mana, the DK1 mechanic of paying for spells with gold seemed like a better option, but if we must have mana there is no doubt that WftO handles it better than DK2 did.

Unfortunately that's the only new thing in WftO that was a real improvement.  I like the idea of the alchemy lab, but found the implementation and the range of potions wanting.  I liked the idea of rituals from the dark temple, but like the alchemy lab I found the implementation wanting (how did sacrifices work exactly, it was never really easy to tell) and the rituals themselves a bit bland.

Then there were the unnecessary add ons, the tech tree was kind of pointless really.

Where the game really suffered was in a failure to take risks.  It isn't so much DK3 as it is a loving recreation of DK2 with a few pointless add ons, and a short campaign.  Worse, they kept the parts of DK2 that weren't all that great, and the parts of DK2 where it became less innovative than DK1.

The best part about DK1 was the inversion of aggression.  In most games the player is the aggressor, the one who dictates the tempo of the game, the one invading the enemy and crushing them.  But in DK1 all that was reversed.  The player was a passive defender, the game dictated its own tempo for the most part, and with a tiny few exceptions the player was the one being invaded (though if they planned well of course they were party doing the crushing).  DK2 and WftO changed that, it is always the player doing the invading and taking the active role.  The joy of building a dungeon filled with traps and lurking monsters waiting to destroy would be heroes who would dare try to steal your gold is not a part of DK2 or WftO and I miss that and I miss the bold innovation and role reversal it entailed.

They also kept the Dungeon Keeper combat system, which is both understandable (imagine the wailing if they changed it and it wasn't very fun) but also disappointing.  Combat is easily the worst part of the entire series, it was never anything more than grabbing your monsters and dropping them into battle then hoping you outnumbered the enemy (or in DK2 hoping you'd managed to get all the Dark Knights while leaving your opponent stuck with the goblins).  Combat in WftO is exactly the same, and that's a point really driven home in the level where you have to fight off several other Keepers (ahem, sorry, "Underlords") and the whole thing is basically a bunch of dropping and occasional smiting of enemies with lightning.  Of all that parts of DK that cried out for change and innovation it was combat that called the loudest, and those calls were ignored.

WftO does away with the DK2 mechanic of a shared pool of potential recruits that all Keepers must compete in, but it makes getting hordes of monsters somewhat difficult. Each building will only summon a tiny number of minions, and buildings cost gold and land.  In a way this is good because it can force you to throw minions into combat you otherwise wouldn't, but its also bad because it makes expansion more a matter of deciding which minions you need the most and building more of their rooms than any other consideration.

I'm iffy about the plot of WftO as well. It was short, had an abrupt end with no real demounement (not something I object to, but something of a risk and apparently one that many other players did object to), and while neither DK1 or DK2 had much in the way of player choice in the plot, the way it was presented felt more natural and less forced than it does in WftO.  You had a home realm that seemed like it'd be fun to decorate and fix up with your newly acquired rooms, but trying to do so resulted in the dark god harassing you every few minutes to get back and finish the campaign which kind of detracted from the potential fun there.  Through the entire game you're the pawn of the dark god, and not an unwitting pawn but rather a pawn who is constantly told that they are a pawn, which got old after a while.

What's worse, the plot sometimes had you do something it claimed was important (beating up the other Underlords to make them serve you) but then apparently forgot about that and their servitude was never mentioned again, you never used them for any purpose, it was just sort of left hanging.

Overall, if you want to relive DK2 with better graphics I'd say WftO is a good buy. It's also pretty fun on its own merits, if nothing spectacular.  Personally, I'm loading up DK1 and DK2 from GOG and playing them again.

Civilization: Beyond Earth, or Alpha Centauri II (sort of)

Civilization: Beyond Earth
Grade: C-
Platform: PC, Mac, GNU/Linux
Genre: 4X
Site
Steam


The good news is, Beyond Earth is basically Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri 2.  The bad news is, Beyond Earth is basically Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri 2.

Like a great many sequels, this one definitely lacks something.  And what it lacks isn't a vague je ne sais quoi, but pretty clearly and easily explained.  But first, let's examine the good, and there is a surprising amount of good considering the low grade I've given the game as a whole.

I get the impression that in a lot of ways we're looking at many of the innovations the Civilization V designers wanted to include in Civ V, but weren't allowed to for fear it'd be too radical a departure from the standard Civilization experience.

Sometimes this is a very nifty approach that I'm sorry that Civ V was too stogy to use.  For example, when you build the first of most newly researched buildings, you're presented with a choice of (usually) two ways you can customize it. I might chose to save energy by having my relics maintenance free, you may chose to pay maintenance on relics but get extra culture from them. It allows for the player to minmax a bit based on their play style.

Likewise, rather than simply replacing old units you get choices in how they can be upgraded.  I don't approve of this as much as I do the building customization because rather than having the freeform units of Alpha Centauri you are given a much more limited set of options based on your ideological choices.  But at least there's some player choice involved, and that's never a bad thing even though it could easily be better.

Unfortunately, some of the new ideas just don't work, I don't know if the devs just didn't want to risk making things too different, or if there was executive meddling, but some changes simply feel timid.

The tech web is a perfect example of this.  Rather than a simple tech tree that everyone climbs and by endgame you either have all the technologies listed or you're just playing badly, Beyond Earth has a genuine tech web.  I suppose it might be possible to get all the techs in a single game, but I haven't yet.  In theory, that would allow for diverse and varied gameplay as you use different parts of the web from your opponents, or change your game style by exploring different techs.

Unfortunately, in practice, the tech web is kind of bleh and really your choices there don't make as much difference in gameplay as you'd hope.  Nor, really, do the choices between the three ideological options of purity, supremacy, and harmony.

So rather than having to make truly hard, game changing, decisions based on the tech you choose to research, the only real factor in your decision is simply what victory condition you want to chase.  A player who has chosen a supremacy ideology and the emancipation victory won't have a game significantly different from a player who chose a harmony ideology and the transcendence victory. And that's a major disappointment because the game has so much potential.  The ideologies are intriguing, and if they and the tech had been more significant and produced different interactions with the game based on those choices it would have been truly wonderful.

We also have the problem of the publisher stripping out big chunks of the game to sell as DLC. The first is already available and allows ocean buildings and more oceanic options as well as adding more factions, improving diplomacy, and so on.  I expect we'll see another coming soon to expand on the anemic orbital game.

What disappoints the most is that Beyond Earth is, kind of, sort of, a sequel to Alpha Centauri.  And that's a problem, because they couldn't use Alpha Centauri intellectual property, that belongs to EA not Fireaxis.  This means that often they tried to duplicate Alpha Centauri ideas, but without referencing the forbidden IP.  Sometimes, some games, some publishers, this can work.  It didn't work for Beyond Earth.

The transcendence victory is clearly a call back to Alpha Centauri.  The problem is that in Alpha Centauri there was an overarching plot involving the planet's fungus being sapient effectively making the whole planet a single mind, so in Alpha Centauri the transcendence victory flowed naturally from the game as a whole.

But in Beyond Earth it just doesn't make sense.  There is no overarching plot of any sort, the aliens are just kind of buglike and it is never indicated that they are intelligent even individually much less collectively, so the idea of joining a planet mind in a telepathic rapport just doesn't fit the game.  But the option is there, because Alpha Centauri did it.

Worse, they didn't try for anything interesting or new in what little plot the game has.  Alpha Centauri had a story, an intreguing story that the player discovered through the tech quotes, through gameplay, through bits of short fiction that popped up at significant events.  It had factions that were believable and interesting and lead by characters who exemplified a single trait but had personality beyond that one trait.  Miriam Godwinson was a religious fanatic to be sure, but there was more to her than just that.

There is no real story in Beyond Earth, the factions are bland and mostly indistinguishable, the faction leaders are mere faces and names.

There are three voice actors, total.  All the tech quotes are done by one actor, and she's fine and does a good job, but it seems kind of limited when compared to the quotes from Alpha Centauri.  Worse, since there isn't an overarching plot, and all the factions are kind of blandly similar, the tech quotes don't - can't -  reveal anything about the factions and their leaders.  When compared to Alpha Centauri in this aspect it falls horribly short.  And frankly, it doesn't do all that well in comparison to the blander Civ tech quotes either. While in Civ the quotes are often meaningful historic quotes, all the Beyond Earth quotes are made up which which would be OK if they told us more about the game setting, but they don't.
I really want to give Beyond Earth a better grade, I loved Alpha Centauri, I applaud efforts to make a sequel, I love that they made it available for GNU/Linux, and I am delighted with the effort to go beyond the Civ restrictions and do newish things with the series.

But, at the end of the day, it just falls flat.  I still play Alpha Centauri, but after finishing three games of Beyond Earth I doubt I'll play much more.  As DLC for Civilization V it'd be fantastic and I'd probably have given it a higher grade.  But as a stand alone game there just isn't enough content to justify the price.

Master of Magic - A retrospective review

Master of Magic
Grade: A-
Platform: Anything that supports DOSBox, originally PC
Genre: 4X before it was called 4X
Site
Game Wiki

Released in 1994, Master of Magic is now old enough to drink.  And despite being a game well worth playing, it shows its age.  People who weren't fans back in the day may not be able to get past the antique graphics or the clunky UI, but if you can the game beneath is something amazingly good that still hasn't been really successfully duplicated.  If you like 4X games you owe it to yourself to try Master of Magic, it's cheap through GOG. There is also a Master of Magic remake, of course, and I'll be reviewing it later, but I recommend the original for the 4X fan who hasn't tried it yet.

Master of Magic was released shortly after Master of Orion, [1] and was intended as a sort of companion or counterpoint to Master of Orion.  Like Master of Orion, Master of Magic features a blend of strategy and tactics, the main action takes place on the world map but when combat begins the player is given a tactical map and interface to direct individual units.

It wasn't originally well received, it was buggy and the AI was broken on release, but that was patched and the game became enshrined in the hearts of 4X fans.  So don't let anyone tell you that releasing a broken game and then patching it post release is all that new, they were doing it back in 1994 too.

Master of Magic is a somewhat odd beast, and my grade of A- may well be tainted by nostalgia but I don't think so, it really is an amazing game.  An amazing game that had many problems baked right into the core mechanics, things that were lamented at release, but in retrospect turn out to be why, 21 years after release, people like me are still playing it from time to time.

To classify the problematic, yet in a weird way good, aspects of Master of Magic I'd say that they make a sort of accidental form of asymmetric game play.  The simple fact is that Master of Magic is not balanced.  At all.  If you start as a human you get access to the full tech tree and the paladin special unit which is immune to magic and can curbstomp pretty much any other unit in the game.  If you start as a lizardman you get a tech tree that's more of a tech shrub and your units can swim.

Yet, despite that, you can win playing nothing but lizardmen.  It requires a completely different play style than winning playing with humans, or high elves, or orcs, or any of the other "better" races, but it is possible.

Magic is similarly unbalanced.  Magic is broken into color based schools, green for life, white for healing, red for destruction, black for evil, blue for air and metamagic, and some are simply better than the others.  It is undeniable that the magic in Master of Magic is as unbalanced as the races.  Start with blue magic and you can summon Phantom Warriors, who mow through most early game units easily, and by late game summon Sky Drakes and throw lightning bolts with enough power to one shot just about any unit.  Start with white magic and you might as well not bother casting spells until mid to late game, and even then your spells will suck compared to blue or red, or even black or green, spells.

And yet...

And yet that very lack of balance is why I keep playing.  Never mind that Master of Magic helped define the 4X game, never mind that it was a truly innovative break from Civilization and Master of Orion.  The fact is that the lack of balance made the game fun and challenging in a way that even modern AI (which often isn't really that much better than antique game AI) or multiplayer often lacks.

Because you CAN win playing a wizard with all white magic and nothing but lizardmen.  You've got to take a human wave approach to combat and expansion, you've got to use your magic to maximize population and healing, you have to hit your enemies fast and hard before they can start pumping out units that will smash your armies solo, it's risky and you may lose horribly, but it can be done.  And succeeding with all the odds against you feels damn good.

There are a handful of deliberately asymmetric games out there, AI War is the canonical example but Sorcerer King represents an attempt to intentionally achieve what Master of Magic did (I think) purely accidentally.  Asymmetric games are hard to design because the whole point of them is that they're unfair, and making something unfair fun, winnable, and challenging is difficult to say the least.  That Master of Magic succeeded in doing it basically by accident is amazing.

One of the ways Master of Magic succeeds is with a game that had a sandbox feel before the term sandbox had been invented.  They developed a game with a greater variety of units, a huge number of spells and magic effects, and allowed the players to mix and match as they chose.  The ability to customize your wizard allows you to minmax traits and spellbooks to create an unstoppable force of nature who can stomp through the game even on impossible difficulty with no real trouble.  Or you can go the opposite route and make a wizard who has a mix of traits and spells you think simply can't win, and then win anyway.

And, unlike in some games featuring magic, the magic in Master of Magic can truly shake the world.  At high levels you can not merely rise individual volcanoes, you can cast a spell that will automatically rise several volcanoes every turn (except in your cities of course) and eventually reshape the whole world into a hellscape of lava flows.  You can cast spells that plunge the world into eternal night, or slowly corrupt every bit of terrain making it unlivable.  You can cast spells to raise every fallen soldier as a zombie in your rotting undead army, or stop time for everyone but you so you can smash them piecemeal and steal their resources in the blink of an eye. Every one of those spells is horribly unbalanced, and fun in a way that the carefully balanced play of most games simply can't match.

Master of Magic is a game that no major studio would dare release today.  But it's good, and you should try it.

[1] Nostalgia is always profitable so naturally Master of Orion is being rebooted.  Here's the Steam page.