Review

I have to be honest and say that I played this game about a year ago, but neglected to write up my impressions (for no good reason). I'm only posting this out of a compulsive need for thoroughness. If I don't write something, I'll have to go on medication, so bear with me. In fairness to the game, I'm not going to be overly critical, since I probably can't remember many details anyway.

I was tempted to lead this off with the following: "Worst. Pathfinding. Ever." However, I'm not sure that's accurate. Let's just call it "really bad" and move on. Did the pathfinding ruin the game for me? No. Did it make it painfully obvious that DR2 could have been a much less frustrating game (though not necessarily more entertaining)? Yes.

Still, on the whole, DR2 isn't a bad game. Pandemic did a much better job with this than the embarrassingly botched job they pulled with Battlezone 2. DR2 has a few refinements that I now consider mandatory in an RTS game: large unit queues, rally points. And it's even got its own small bag of tricks: there's a nice day/night cycle that effects energy management (briefly, until you progress technically past solar collectors), and a nice UI improvement that allows you to manage your build queues without having to actually physically locate and click on your buildings. It doesn't hold a candle to Kohan's ease-of-use, but it's something. I think Pandemic did a respectable job with the camera, it's flexible and responsive. I appreciated being able to zoom out far enough to actually generate some situational awareness. This is something at which I think the Blizzard games, in particular, really fail miserably. The game is drop-dead gorgeous, and the camera really shows it off.

Still, I feel like a parent whose 6-yr old just showed them a picture she drew and is compelled to say something nice. In reality, DR2 is still a vastly underachieving game. The strategy is degenerate, leaving the player on the all-too-familiar treadmill of harvesting exhaustible resource points to fuel the sprint up the tech-tree to the uber-units. If game developers spent a tenth of the time they spend on their rendering engines thinking about gameplay, we'd live in a much more interesting world. Alas, the modus operandi seems to be to take whatever's in vogue at the moment and churn out more and more technically advanced clones.

It really doesn't help things that DR2 has a downright forgettable backstory. How forgettable? I don't remember anything about it, that's how much. It has some unique names for things, but it fits snugly in the following template: The [faction A] is at war with the [faction B] over [some issue]. There's an oppressive establishment, and a rebellious uprising, yadda yadda. There's probably some power struggle over an alien artifact in there, too. I don't remember.

Let me say this, however: DR2 has a cooperative play option that should be in every RTS game. You heard me, every single damned one of them. It should be mandatory. It's the ability for multiple human players to simultaneously play/control a single base. Age of Empires pioneered this, I believe, and it gets my money on the counter faster than anything else.

Ultimately, though, DR2 can't escape the mediocrity of its game design. It's like a school project, where a team was tasked with making a 3D Command & Conquer clone with really impressive graphics, and solving the associated UI issues. In this respect, Pandemic succeeded. In the bigger picture, as an industry, an interactive medium, we really should be long past this.