Dota 2 Fan should wait for 2012

Among a swarm of other noteworthy titles, DotA 2 has garnered a significant amount of attention at this years GamesCom, and justifiably so. The full sequel to the legendary Warcraft III custom map, Defense of the Ancients, this Valve developed title aims to capture the intricacies of the original property while allowing for further customization and expansion through their now ubiquitous Source Engine. Though DotA 2 will serve as Valve's first Action RTS title, they seem to be handling the game with dutiful care. So much so that it was prominently featured in a dedicated tournament labeled "The International," with a top prize of $1 million going to the victorious squad. That's one million dollars; more than most professional athletes make in a tournament of their respective sport.


Along with an auspicious debut to the public, DotA 2 did bring with it some potentially sad news for devout fans. Instead of making the originally planned release later this year, Valve announced that it looks much more likely that we won't be able to bring DotA 2 into our homes until early 2012. However, to assuage the angst of fans, Valve also announced the launch of an invitation-only beta test, for which you can register now through Steam. In addition to the closed beta, Valve intimated that their would be an open beta available sometime later in the year, but no details were provided on that specifically. While waiting for the release, feel free to check out an epic matchup in a slice of the "International" tournament below.

Josh Garwood

Tom Clancy's EndWar Review

Tom Clancy's EndWar is a real-time strategy game created for consoles that has now found its way to the PC. How's that for a twist? With its innovative voice controls and strong production values, EndWar was an enjoyable experience on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, granting armchair commanders a sense of high-tech supremacy. Yet on a platform overflowing with quality RTS options, its core simplicity is far more obvious.

Its three near-future factions all play the same way, the rock-paper-scissors relationships between units are incredibly straightforward, and the single-player campaign doesn't tell any story to speak of, which is a blatant missed opportunity. Nevertheless, a novel multiplayer mode and persistent units that carry from one mission to the next keep things interesting, and on the whole, EndWar is a mildly enjoyable game, even if it never feels like a comfortable fit on the PC.

To get the most out of the experience, you'll need to plug in a headset. To order your units about, you issue a series of preset commands by holding down the space bar and speaking your directive into the microphone. This runs the gamut from attacking enemy squads ("Unit two, attack hostile four") and bringing in reinforcements when they are available ("Deploy gunships") to centering your view on a particular group ("Unit three, camera") and ordering special attacks ("Air strike, hostile six").

There are limited possibilities, so don't expect to plan out multiple waypoints or set up tank patrols. Nor can you rely completely on the microphone--at least, not if you intend to be competitive. Actions like garrisoning infantry in a building or ordering your units to unleash special attacks require some key presses, so there is a bit of light micromanagement in this regard. If you'd rather take a traditional approach, you can use a mouse and keyboard, but doing so makes EndWar more frustrating than fun.

Because the camera must be focused on a particular unit, you can't scroll across the map and issue orders with ease. You can enter a "sitrep" view, assuming your command vehicle hasn't been destroyed, which makes issuing orders with a mouse more feasible but is visually unappealing. Should you decide to use a headset (which you should, if you want to experience EndWar at its best), you may need to mess around with settings in Windows and within the game menus to get your hardware to work properly.

A standard Logitech headset recognized most voice commands, while others were less successful (or completely unsuccessful) in consistently recognizing instructions. The units themselves are products of EndWar's World War III setting. In the game's version of near-future events, The United States, Russia, and a unified Europe have become superpowers, and the US plans to launch a military space station to tip the worldwide balance of power in its favor.

Unfortunately, terrorists destroy the station upon liftoff, thereby igniting global conflict. Yet as interesting and far-fetched as the setting is, it's mostly backdrop. The campaign is just a series of battles against the AI that emulates EndWar's main multiplayer mode, so don't expect much exposition, larger-than-life personalities, or political intricacies. You can play as any of the three factions, but while your own commander (and his or her blatant accent) will change, there's no story to involve you, aside from mission updates and news blurbs.

Thus, there's no reason to play the campaign with another faction if you've finished it once already. This lack of narrative is a big disappointment, given Tom Clancy's pedigree of political page-turners.Nevertheless, EndWar has a way of drawing you in, not just because of the unique control mechanism, but because it lets you closely follow your squads into battle. Regardless of your faction, the basic units are the same: Infantry comprises riflemen and engineers; tanks and artillery have the armored advantage; gunships take to the skies; and transports not only whisk your infantry about the battlefield, but offer necessary antiair support.

Most of the time, you'll be switching your view from squad to squad, and the camera's close-up vantage point has quite an impact when you're engaged in combat. Bullets fly, gunships fall from the sky, and artillery fire rains from above, and some visual glitches aside, it's all exciting and cinematic in a way that most other strategy games just can't accomplish. Using sitrep view lets you get a quick overview of the battlefield, which is useful but not particularly dramatic.

The rapid zoom of the camera when you move in and out of this mode and from one unit to the next, however, is slick. While it may be authentic to have so few unit types and no striking difference between factions given the setting, it doesn't make any side worth playing more than another. The relationship between units is always the same--tanks beat transports, gunships beat tanks, and so on--so there's little subtlety to the gameplay.

Instead, strategy is delivered on a broader level, starting with the mission objectives. There are four main mission types: assault, conquest, siege, and raid. Assault is the simplest (kill your enemy), while in Raid, you must either destroy or defend certain buildings on the map to achieve victory. Conquest is the most interesting mode, taking its cues from the Battlefield games in addition to EndWar's closest RTS cousin, World in Conflict.

Here, you must use infantry to capture control points, called uplinks, scattered across the map while fending off the enemy and sabotaging their attempts to do the same. Siege battles are much less common than other types and involve an assaulting player attempting to capture a critical uplink while the defending player struggles to maintain control of it.

Tactics are generally obvious in all of these situations, but they can still generate a tense tug-of-war between players as each jockeys for position. Uplinks are present in all modes, and they are a critical part of the gameplay. Most importantly, they help you earn command points, which you need in order to call in reinforcements and perform other actions.

However, uplinks can be taken only by infantry, so even if you aren't playing a conquest map, you'll still want some riflemen or engineers in the field. Uplinks also hold a second key to victory: upgrades that allow you to engage support powers like air strikes and electronic attacks.

These powers are invaluable in a sticky situation but also cost command points, so you'll need to weigh the advantage of bringing in another transport to defeat your gunship-heavy opponent against a quick strike that could do immediate damage. There are even short-range nukes to deploy in certain circumstances that can immediately turn the tide of battle and produce a spectacular explosion.

All of these battles are given context within a larger turn-based map called the Theater of War. The offline theater is good for practice, but it's the online theater that provides the meat of the experience.

This semiglobal map is persistent, so as opposing players engage one another, the results of an entire day's matches represent a single turn within the theater. Once the day's turn is complete, new battles open up as each faction spreads its dominion. This is a great idea that may remind you of a similar mode in the mech action game Chromehounds.

But while the sameness of each faction makes it hard to feel particularly loyal, it's involving to watch your faction's color spread across the map, whether that means establishing your presence in Florida or burning Paris to the ground. A few days after the game's release, however, relatively few players seem to be participating in the theater, making EndWar's long-term viability unclear.

Your battle prowess has global consequences, but success brings more than a victory for your faction. You'll also earn a supply of credits after each battle that you can then spend on upgrades for your units. Surviving units gain levels, which gives them access to purchased enhancements, which could mean faster movement speed, new support powers (being able to designate a new drop point for reinforcements is ever so helpful), or additional attacks that can be triggered when you are following the unit that can perform them.

Like the Theater of War, this feature seems like it's supposed to make you feel emotionally attached to your faction's success, and it works to an extent, giving you an incentive that functions on a more personal level. While new attacks open up some minor micromanagement options, they don't bring drastic changes, because most battles are still won or lost with quick uplink securing and a basic understanding of rock-beats-scissors dynamics.

While EndWar's tactics were designed on a broader scale, its presentation attempts to throw you into the midst of battle. When firefights get heavy, the screen fills with units and explosions, and it's fun to watch the destruction on the ground from the vantage point of a gunship squad firing at tanks or engineers from above. Some smaller touches make an impact, such as the authentic-looking behavior of engineer squads as they enter a building or a transport.

However, the PC version looks much less impressive than its console counterparts. Textures are bland, while lighting, shadows, and other aspects are simply average, so even with all settings turned up, the quality of the visuals doesn't seem to justify the relatively high system requirements. EndWar also suffers from occasional performance problems, which affect not only the frame rate, but the speed of the entire game, which can suddenly start chugging for no obvious reason.

The sound design does a better job of immersing you in battle. This is partially due to the din of combat--perfectly appropriate for World War III. However, it's the constant radio chatter and responses of your units that have the greatest impact, making you feel as though you really are in the role of a military commander.

The sound effects aren't just cosmetic, however: EndWar's constant feedback is an important tactical tool, letting you make split-second decisions that could mean life or death for your squad. Unfortunately, there are too many times when crucial feedback ("Check unit nine") comes far too late for it to do any good. EndWar's voice command mechanic makes it unique among strategy games, and it's this innovation that stands out above all of its other features.

Strip it away, and you'll find an RTS game that can be fun but is ultimately too simple to stand out in a crowded genre. But even if strategy veterans won't find all the complexities they'd expect, there's something to be said for EndWar's smart match types and persistent campaign. Hopefully as its community grows, so too will the game's long-term possibilities.

Kevin Vanord

Angry Birds Review

Most casual news watchers are familiar with explosives that have names like "bunker busters" and "daisy cutters." However, in Rovio Mobile's popular game, Angry Birds, multicolored chickens can take on the properties of these same bombs when pushed to the limits by egg-stealing green pigs.

Explosive chickens, adorable as they are, would be pointless without big buildings to topple, and Angry Birds provides more than 200 of them, with more added all the time. You can thoroughly demolish anything from stone castles to glass houses as you punish those evil, egg-stealing pigs.

To play, you simply load up a chicken in your slingshot, pull back while setting your angle, and let go to start the destruction. Angry Birds' gameplay is incredibly easy to understand, and the visual payoff for blowing stuff up is consistently impressive. Blue chickens split up in midair for a spread effect; heavy bomb chickens explode and send structures flying; and egg-laying hens let you deliver a yolky payload directly below.

You always receive the chickens in a particular order, which diminishes some of the strategy. Even though some chickens can be used to set up chain reactions, like using a burrowing hen to soften up a building's stone exterior and then following up with a ticking explosive chicken to blast out the walls--you don't get to do this if you don't get the chickens in this order.

Although you might fling your chickens in the same spot each time, the game's sensitive physics system usually gives different results. It's generally impossible to re-create specific trajectories and reactions, so there's some luck involved where obtaining a high score (and a full three-star rating) is concerned. There aren't really any tangible benefits to completing every mission with a three-star score, besides boasting about your score on the online leaderboards, anyway. Angry Birds has some minor issues, but most of the time, you won't notice because you'll be too busy trying to squish pigs and make full use of your chicken arsenal. The game's weapons, physics, and varied levels are really quite excellent, and they make this military-farm-complex a whole lot of fun.

Andrew Podolsky

Age of empire 3 : dynasties review

We'll never turn down a chance to play more Age of Empires, so when Microsoft, Ensemble and Big Huge Games announced a brand new expansion pack for Age of Empires III, we were all for it. The new game adds three new Asian civilizations, each with new units and buildings and their own five-mission campaign. It's not surprising that the expansion maintains the excellent unit balance and exciting presentation that the series is known for. Still, while the new Asian civs are enjoyable, the campaign lacks some of the drama and variety that we'd hoped to see.

Asian Dynasties steps away a bit from the more fictional campaigns of previous games in the series in favor of a slightly more historical approach. Still, the fictional main characters in the campaigns give the designers room to tell a relatively unique story set within a firm historical framework. The Japanese campaign kicks things off by retelling some key events in Tokugawa's efforts to unite Japan. From there, we see a mutiny in the Chinese navy as the Treasure Fleet moves first to India and then to the New World. Finally, the Indian campaign puts players in charge of a British officer who decides to lend his support to the cause of Indian independence.

I miss some of the cool resource-oriented missions of the previous games, but Asian Dynasties has its own charms -- from finding and securing beached treasure ships to stampeding elephants through enemy towns. Naturally, a lot of the missions require players to capture and hold trading posts, destroy enemy town centers, and protect your own structures from enemy attack. The best missions move back and forth between different objectives giving the player a chance to choose how they'll tackle the overall scenario.

Sadly, only a handful of scenarios really present the player with any wide range of approaches. There will sometimes be an option as to which of two paths you're going to take into the enemy base, but there's usually a "right" and a "wrong" answer even here. Most missions do allow players some choice in determining the order in which they take on secondary objectives but in all the campaigns here felt a bit more linear than they have in previous Age games.

And for the life of us, we can't figure out why there wasn't more of an emphasis on sea battles. We built two single docks in the course of the entire 15-mission campaign and once it was just to get to the enemy land base across the water. With the Chinese Treasure Fleet and the British East India Company featuring so heavily in the campaign, it was a bit of a letdown that there wasn't more opportunity for sea fights.

The Asian armies have all the cool units you'd expect, from samurai, to firework rockets, to howdahs. Big Huge Games has really captured the flavor of the combat very nicely with a wide range of colorful units that provide significant enough advantages to encourage players to create a well-rounded army. As with the other Age games, creating small groups of balanced forces that can deal equally well with infantry, cavalry and artillery keeps you from having to micromanage the target priorities in each and every encounter.

Even though nearly all the units are useful in one capacity or another, there are nevertheless a few that really captured our attention. The Japanese Daimyo (available as a home shipment unit) is a powerful warlord that acts both as a walking barracks and a drop off point for all future military shipments from the home city. This really gives the Japanese civilization the opportunity to engage in some truly relentless advances. The trick is to keep the Daimyo close enough to the action to keep the reinforcements flowing fast but far enough away that he's not likely to be in too much danger.

The Indians, of course, rely on a wide variety of elephant units. Those that can trample over archers and melee fighters are interesting enough (and a heck of a lot of fun to watch), but the real stars here are the anti-building elephants. Some come armed with mighty flails attached to their trunks and others have long-range cannons mounted on their backs. It's great to have the option to wreak damage from up close or from far away with these elephants. They suck up a lot of resources population points when you build them but the Indians have a number of home city shipments that can drastically reduce their price and support requirements.

The Chinese are a little different. It's not as obvious to us which of their units are our favorites because you don't actually build single units with the Chinese. Instead, you select one of a number of pre-made groups of mixed units that are, like the single units of the other civilizations, still geared for combat against a particular type of enemy. You can still lead the units individually once the entire group has been produced but the Chinese don't have an option to build just one or two units at a time. This can create some tough situations where you don't have the resources or time to order up a group of units five strong, but it definitely makes it easier to field large armies quickly in the later stages of the game.

Each civilization has its own unique buildings and economic needs. The Indians for instance, benefit from a free villager with nearly every home city shipment. If your economy is booming, you can trade in the villager for two sepoys later on. The Indians will find themselves getting more shipments than most other civilizations, thanks to their unique Sacred Fields structure. Simply placing cows at the Sacred Field will start to generate experience points for the Indians.

Each civilization can also benefit from the new Customs House. This structure allows players to ally themselves with one of a number of European powers to gain a one-time bonus and access to European units. These units are bought with the new "export" resource, which is earned by setting aside a portion of your existing resource gathering efforts to trade with the European ally. Fortunately, setting the percentage of resources you want to trade is as easy as hitting a button in the Customs interface so you won't have to worry over assigning additional workers to the new resource.

The Asians also have plenty of new wonders that can radically alter the pace and flow of the game. Building the Great Buddha lets you spend coin to see everything in your enemies' line of sight. It's probably the coolest power in the game but its cost scales with the number of enemies you have. Going up against a major player with lots of buildings and units, it can easily cost several thousand coin. The Indian Agra is another of our favorites. This massive palace gives you access to a single elite version of each of your unit types. They're incredibly expensive but they multiply the effectiveness of all other similar units in your armies, so they're well worth the investment.

Interestingly, the wonders are also the way that Asian civilizations advance to new Ages. Rather than simply shucking resources out the window to gain access to new technology upgrades, new units and new shipments, the resources you spend to build wonders actually result in a persistent benefit that sticks with you throughout the game. Each time you Age up, you'll have the chance to pick from one of the five wonders available to you civilization.

Finally, the multiplayer side of Age of Empires has been enlarged with a new game type, King of the Hill. In King of the Hill there's a large central fort that the players have to capture and hold. The delicate equation here is whether or not to race to grab it right at the start and hope that your initial force can hold out long enough for you to reinforce it, or to hang back a bit and let the other players bloody themselves in a back and forth battle before coming in with your own fresh armies that you've been building in the meantime. Since Asian Dynasties isn't on a lot of PCs yet, we've only really been able to dig in to the game type in skirmishes against the PC but so far it seems like a game type that's going to be fairly popular.

Finally, the visual and audio work in the expansion are right up there with what we've come to expect from this series. The units and buildings are well designed and full of lots of lively detail. The wonders look particularly awesome with loads of intricate detailing. And while that's where most of your attention is, the small touches here and there really bring the game to life. Seeing green birds drift high above the carnage, or seeing smoke plumes from burning houses just adds that much more believability to the game. Likewise, the excellent voiceovers carry the drama nicely and are supplemented with the types of music and sound effects we've already come to love in the series.

Steve Butts

Kingdom Under Fire II : preview

Gamers in the United States might not be too familiar with the Kingdom Under Fire series. Even though role-playing games are popular in North America, Kingdom Under Fire doesn't have the same sort of following that other big RPG names do. So when I was on my way to a meeting with representatives from South Korean publisher Blueside, I didn't expect anything more than an everyday RPG. Soon after my meeting began, I came to the conclusion that Kingdom Under Fire II was my biggest surprise at this year's Tokyo Game Show. This action RPG looks stunning.

Those that haven't played any other Kingdom Under Fire game needn't worry -- this is a title that can stand on its own. The game combines the epic action of large-scale battles with the online functionality found in massively multiplayer online games. That formula alone sounds fantastic, but Kingdom Under Fire II is made all the sweeter by its incredible visuals.

I, unfortunately, wasn't able to play Kingdom Under Fire II for myself, but I didn't need to. The raw enthusiasm and pride the folks at Blueside have for their game is palpable and they played several missions for me to show me exactly why people should be excited about their project. Kingdom Under Fire II allows players to create their own hero that can belong to one of four different classes (more classes will be added later). Not only do players control the hero character on the battlefield, but they can also command troops at the same time, giving the game a pinch of real-time strategy.

In the game, players will be able to execute traditional combos with their hero character and cast a wide variety of spells, including techniques that assist the friendly troops around them. When I was watching the game being played, the hero would charge into a group of enemies and unleash a torrent of attacks, while his troops charged in behind him. I was especially impressed with the camera work during battles, as the screen will shake and shift with the action, making the experience much more urgent than if the player's view was static.

Although it looked like a button-masher at first, Kingdom Under Fire II requires some definite skill, as players must jump between troop divisions on the fly to issue commands. During one particular mission, the Blueside representative had to continuously switch between his main troop and a ranged support troop further up the battlefield. These support troops would unleash deadly volleys that peppered the hero's enemies from afar.

The real beauty of the game, however, comes from the sheer spectacle of what's happening on the screen at one time. Hundreds, if not thousands, of nicely detailed units clash on the battlefield as arrows and gunfire saturate the sky. I was blown away when massive monsters entered the fray, stomping across the war-torn hills and scattering soldiers like pebbles through the air. In a trailer that was shown to me, a small group of dragons descended on the battlefield and unleashed green fire onto the helpless soldiers below.

The action of Kingdom Under Fire II was fantastic, but there's plenty of hardcore RPG goodness as well. There's a robust character creation system in place for designing your ideal hero, and almost everything in the game can be tweaked, from your clothing and accessories to the troops under your command. In fact, I was told that there would be more than 100 different troop types available at the start, meaning you will have tons of soldiers to work with as you travel across the world.

This is where the game's massively multiplayer functionality comes into play. The world of Kingdom Under Fire II is a persistent one that can be accessed by thousands of players at once. When you travel across the world map (on foot or by airship, which you can purchase further into the game), you'll see other players traveling in the same environment. Although only eight players can participate in a battle at once, many more will exist in your game world, which is designed to enhance the feeling of community in the game.

Kingdom Under Fire II is an example of a low-profile game that's impressive because of the great efforts of the developers behind it. Of course, there's no way for me to know at this point in time if the game controls well and is fun after extended periods of play, but I have reason to suspect that this game is one to look forward to.

Kingdom Under Fire II is tentatively scheduled for a North American launch at the end of next year. The game is being developed for PCs and consoles, though console specifics have yet to be unannounced.

Ryan Clements

Shogun 2: Total War preview

“We were talking a moment ago about a historical character who, in a battle, inspired his men to great feats of bravery by cutting his own head off during the charge,” says Mike Simpson, Creative Assembly’s creative director. “Now, this is obviously a one shot special ability.”

Total War is going back to the beginning. Before there was Napoleon, or an Empire, or a Rome to fall, there was Shogun: Total War. Released in 2000, it wed battlefield tactics and campaign strategy, enabled us to conquer feudal Japan, and turned its developers from creators of EA Sports titles to leaders of strategy gaming. This is a return to where it all started.

Where Napoleon was meant as a standalone expansion to Empire, one that grew larger than expected, Shogun 2 is absolutely meant to be the next major entry in the series. I’ve travelled to Creative Assembly’s headquarters, to a room where the Shogun 1 menu music plays on a loop and Shogun 2 posters keep peeling from the walls, to get the first glimpse of what Creative refer to as both Total War 6 and Total War 0.

“The idea is to take roughly ten years of experience in making Total War games and make the game we wanted to make right at the beginning,” explains Kieran Brigden, CA’s communications manager. “We take all the technology and advancements in everything we’ve done and we apply that to making the game we wanted to make right at the start.”

So it’s back in Japan – that much is obvious – but a lot of the details are different. Your journey for supremacy begins in 1540, later than the beginning of the original game, which Simpson now feels got off to too slow a start. There are now four turns a year, one for each season, rather than just two. And the fight for Japan is between eight clans – not including a ninth tutorial faction.

“All of these warring factions in the 1540s period are poised to take over Japan,” Kieran says. “Direct assault on the emperor himself is absolutely forbidden because he’s God’s representative on Earth, but you can still control the emperor as a puppet, much like people did with the papacy in medieval Europe, by saying, ‘I’m clearly the military force here, and if you designate me as the Shogun – the armed protector of all Japan – then I will be the sword for your heavenly vision. Shogun 2 is about becoming that powerful.”

During my visit I spoke to Simpson, Brigden, Total War’s lead designer James Russell, and Shogun 2’s design lead Jamie Ferguson, and what immediately became clear is that it’s still early days. Some of the questions I asked during our discussion would elicit not an answer, but a smirk and a knowing look between them. They’re obviously still in meetings every day, talking about the game and trying to work out exactly what they’re doing. But they’re also obviously loving every moment of it, and their excitement at returning to Japan is infectious.

Graham Smith

Sid Meier’s Civilization V review

Defying the urge to phone-in an unambitious sequel and coast on past successes, Sid Meier’s Civilization V is anything but a lazy rehash. It feels almost as if someone described the concept of the renowned 19-year-old turn-based strategy series to a talented designer who’d never played it, and let him come up with his own version. It’s similar enough to be familiar to veterans, different enough to be fresh, and its polish and accessibility make it a great place for new players to pick up one hell of a Civ addiction.

At a foundational level, it’s very familiar. You begin with a single settler in 4000 BC, and over the next 6,050 years you lead your fledgling nation turn-by-turn as you found a city, research technologies, raise an army, build history’s greatest man-made wonders, expand to a sprawling empire and finally make your play for world domination – all in competition with other nations.

Graphics may be superficial in a game like this, but it has to be said that Civ V is indisputably the best looking turn-based strategy game ever made. The painterly art style of the randomly-generated virgin landscape you see when starting a new game feels like Monet meets Google Maps, with bright colors and stunning attention to detail. Zooming in on a tile with a fur resource shows a pair of foxes frolicking together. Cattle, sheep, horses and elephants graze their respective tiles indicating sources of food, mounts and ivory, and in the hypnotically glistening ocean you can see whales breaching and schools of fish swimming beneath the surface. It’s the most beautiful, lively virtual game board you’ve ever seen.

Things are equally impressive when humans arrive and start paving over the natural beauty. There are several distinct styles to cities from different cultures (Asian, European, African, etc.) and not only do the bonus-giving Great Wonders, like the Pyramids or the Statue of Liberty, appear on the map, you can actually see them under construction. After staring almost unblinkingly at these images for dozens of hours, I really appreciated the craftsmanship here.

Under the striking visual layer are innumerable changes to the usual Civ gameplay. Some seem like a bigger deal than they actually are—going in, I’d expected the most dramatic one would be the shift from the traditional map of a grid of squares to Civ V’s honeycomb of hexagons. In practice, this turned out to be one of the least transformative changes—after just a few minutes of ordering around my units I barely noticed the difference, and I never once found myself pining for the old squares. Likewise, though I wasn’t certain about it for the first dozen hours or so, the new super-friendly interface has grown on me quite a bit, despite its almost over-eagerness to move things along.

This is war

In reality, the most revolutionary renovation is warfare. When nations collide, this is far and away the most tactically deep Civ ever. In board game terms, Civ I through IV are like Risk, where you can stack all your armies on one space and march around the world conquering everything in your path. Civ V scraps that system in favor of something more like global-scale chess, where each space can only be occupied by one combat unit at a time, and some, like archers and artillery, can attack over a distance.

This changes absolutely everything about the way war is fought, and almost entirely for the better. Unit positioning matters almost as much as having the most technologically advanced military—and it’s far more than just placing your spearman on a defensible hill or forest tile. You’ve also got to take into account if you’re attacking across a river, flanking bonuses (putting two of your units adjacent to an enemy unit), any bombardment units or aircraft in range and the huge impact of the presence of a Great General. Plus, cities are now formidable combat units themselves with built-in defenses, and never give up without a fight.

It took a bit of practice to learn how to plan my troop movements to avoid slapstick-comedy traffic jams and bottlenecks, but once I got the hang of it I found it to be extremely nuanced. I had to pause and consider how to approach an enemy city, since charging in unprepared risks annihilation by an inferior but better-prepared opponent.

Combat is so engrossing that my first few games were all about conquest, even though I initially set out to win by being the first nation to research, build and launch a spaceship to another solar system. I couldn’t resist going on rampages, wiping out other nations in ’self defense’. Oh, so I took St. Petersburg and now you want to negotiate peace, huh? Well too freaking bad! You shoulda thought of that before you decided to take a shot at me, Catherine the Great.

This is a huge step forward for Civ warfare, but it isn’t perfect. Having to move each unit individually rather than in stacked groups makes moving a large force around pretty tedious. A bigger problem is the AI, which can’t grasp the subtleties—it has a bad habit of wheeling its long-range artillery directly up to my melee units. On higher difficulty levels the AI simply gets a resource boost to overwhelm you with numbers, rather than any more tactical smarts.

When AI attacks

That’s not to say it’s easy to tackle—at this point any difficulty level higher than the “normal” Prince level beats me up and takes my national lunch money —but some victories felt undeserved.

Playing against human players solves that problem, and Civ V’s slew of flexible options let you scale a standard game’s marathon length down to a more manageable couple of hours. Sadly, the battles don’t work quite as well in the confusing, simultaneous turn-based multiplayer, where all players are all moving their pieces in no particular sequence at the same time. It’s messy and unpredictable, especially coming from the orderly turn-taking of single-player. It’s still fun, just … uncivilized.

In some ways, though, the AI impressed me. Leaders are perceptive enough to pop up and inform me that they’re not going to stand for my massing armies on their borders. That said, diplomacy could stand to be a little more transparent—sudden declarations of war caught me totally off guard, like when, after a long period of peace and mutually beneficial trade relations with Gandhi’s India, the little bald jerk allied with Japan to invade my Roman Empire without provocation. Think about that for a second: I was attacked by Gandhi. It’s hard not to take that personally.

While combat has become more complex and more demanding of your attention, other areas have been mercifully simplified to prevent mental overload. You couldn’t ask for better city automation tools—if you want, you never have to do anything besides pick what you want your cities to build. In a big divergence from past Civs, the populations of cities don’t have individual moods, but all contribute to a national happiness level that can boost you into a super-productive golden age or drag you down into stagnation. It’s a simple concept to grasp, and it requires far less micromanagement because you’re able to build a lot of happiness-producing structures in successful cities that balance out discontent elsewhere.

Policy upgrades

Likewise, the new government system does its best to avoid over-complicating itself. It’s essentially a set of 10 RPG-style skill trees that allow you to shape your government over time, rather than make an abrupt shift from a republic to communism.

When you’ve built up some culture points, you unlock policy categories one at a time, then spend points within those categories to unlock specialized bonuses that boost your economy, army, research or other trait. It didn’t require me to cripple myself to experiment—some choices are better than others for certain situations, but they’re all useful, and timely policy unlocks saved my bacon more than once. When I nearly drove my empire into financial ruin with military unit upkeep costs, I unlocked the base level of the Autocracy tree. Instantly my unit maintenance cost was reduced by a third, balancing the budget and netting me a nice surplus. However, in doing so, I closed off the Liberty and Freedom trees and their bonuses to population growth and culture generation. Still, sacrifices must be made in war.

One other area has seen a rise in complexity: I’m a big fan of the way that Civ V treats strategic resources like horses, coal and uranium. If I only have one horse available, I can only build one mounted unit. It makes such resources feel much more valuable and worth trading and fighting for. Technology is also precious: unlike previous Civs, in this one you can’t swap technologies with your allies for quick advancement. I had to look at resource management in a whole new way: if I didn’t research it, I didn’t get it. It makes catching up from a tech deficit significantly more difficult, too, so I felt particularly motivated to prioritise meeting the efforts of my nation’s needs.

Along with bands of roving hostile barbarians, Civ V’s maps come pre-populated with city-states, single-city civilizations which are basically Civ’s equivalent of quest-giving NPCs. Keep them happy and safe, and they’ll reward you with alliances, trade goods, culture points and even free military units.

They may not have the personality or megalomaniacal ambition of full-fledged nations, but they’re an entertaining addition—especially when they put hits out on their neighboring city-states. It’s a little disappointing that pretty much the only way to reliably keep them on side for long is to pay for their friendship, but when you tire of their insolence you can just conquer them like any other city.

Conquer and rule

What to do with a city when you conquer it? Civ V gave me an interesting new option alongside annexing your prize directly and burning it to the ground: installing a puppet ruler who would run the city as an independent subsidiary of your empire, kicking up all the profits generated but not allowing you to dictate what it builds. As a mostly conquest-oriented player more interested in warfare than hands-on governing, I found this option invaluable, since it averted the nation-wide buzzkill that accompanies an occupied populace and staves off the end-game doldrums of past Civs, in which turns took forever because you had to do everything yourself.

I’m going to be playing Civ V for a very, very long time. The freedom to pursue multiple victories—domination, scientific, cultural, diplomatic or simply running out the calendar with the highest score—combined with the wide range of interesting faction bonuses and unique units makes it almost endlessly replayable. (You may have heard that Civ V will have launch-day DLC for sale, peddling an extra Babylonian faction, but take my word for it: the 18 off-the-shelf factions are plenty.)

As for where this game fits into the series, Civilization V isn’t necessarily a definitively ‘better’ empire-building game on Civilization IV – as that would be almost impossible. This is more of an equal that exists in parallel, offering a fresh and invigorating style of play with more emphasis on combat.

Civ V isn’t simply a rehash of what came before with better graphics (though it has those, too): it’s a whole new world with a whole new set of rich, intricate rules to master. It’s also impossible for a strategy fan to resist picking up … or to quit.

Dan Stapleton

StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm Coming Eighteen Months After Wings Of Liberty

In a few months Blizzard will release StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which includes the Terran single-player campaign as well as the full multiplayer component. Blizzard believes that the first expansion will arrive about a year and a half later.

"We're estimating about 18 months from release of Wings of Liberty to when the next one comes out," lead producer Chris Sigaty told Shacknews. "That's purely speculative, honestly."

Sigaty continued: "Historically, it's taken us about a year-WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne is a good example-but you'll see the sum-total package [in Wings of Liberty] has raised the bar and there's a lot more to do with StarCraft II's expansions. I think 18 months is probably fairly accurate."

Wings is targeted for a mid-year release, which would mean the expansion could arrive in late 2011. The first expansion, called Heart of the Swarm, will have a single-player campaign for the Zerg. The trilogy will be completed by Legacy of the Void, which stars the Protoss. Assuming they adhere to this 18 month schedule, that would put Legacy as a mid-2013 release.

Dota 2 preview

Some of you might be thinking, “What is Dota 2?” Dota began as a user-made modification for Warcraft 3 and has grown into one of the most played online games in the world. Following in the tradition of Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Portal, and Alien Swarm, Dota 2 is the result of Valve hiring the community developers who built the mod and giving them the chance to finally build a full product out of their idea with the help of a professional team of developers and artists at Valve.

As for the gameplay, it’s a little hard to describe. The camera is set in the traditional RTS perspective, but it wouldn’t be fair to call Dota an RTS. And while each hero starts at level 1, and many times hits the level cap of 25, it wouldn’t be fair to call it an RPG.

Lots of people have tried to assign various genre names to Dota, but we think Action RTS is probably the most descriptive. And while we don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre the game is inventing, we can’t stop playing it internally and we’re pretty excited to show everyone how we’re doing.

This site is where you can come to follow us along as we build the game. The first four images we shipped with the initial announcement are just the start of us showing you our work as we build it. We’re all looking forward to getting more of the game in front of you all.

Dota Team

When Plants meets Zombies

You would be forgiven for saying you've had your fill of tower defense games. The past couple years has seen a flood of these strategy clones filling casual portals like the iPhone and PC. But you know who might be able to bring you back: the people that brought you Peggle. PopCap, one of the best casual developers and publishers around, has delivered Plants vs. Zombies, its first tower defense game. While it uses the basic mechanics of all efforts in this genre, it boasts charm, personality, and gobs of gameplay variety. The result is another addictive experience that will appeal to all walks of gamers.

Zombies are creeping on your lawn, and your garden is your last line of defense against these brain-crazy cannibals. You have some pretty peculiar (but useful) plants at your disposal, including pea shooters that spit green balls at the undead, hot tamales that burn everything in their path, and Venus zombie traps. By planting various seeds in strategic locations around your lawn you may be able to hold off the onslaught and keep them from entering your house and eating your brain.

Unlike many tower defense games there isn't a winding path the zombies follow towards your home. The yard is divided into six rows and zombies shuffle in fairly orderly. They won't cross over into other lanes but you will find multiple bodies coming in on one row. It's a very simple concept and, in fact, when you first play Plants vs. Zombies you may find it to be too laid back; too easy. But the real draw here is the incredible variety of plants (towers) and zombies. There are 48 kinds of plants with numerous offensive, defensive, and production capabilities, and 26 different zombies. Completing each level in the game will unlock a new plant or item to add to your arsenal. These constant rewards really keep you involved and will have you saying "just one more level" long after you initially thought there wasn't much to the game.

At the start of each round you can pick which seeds to take into battle. You only have a limited amount of slots in your inventory, although you can increase your stash over time. With such an assortment of abilities and resource demands, half the battle is in picking effective weapons. The array of choices means you can customize your strategy and confront the undead on your own terms.

There is also a wide variety of gameplay styles. Some levels take place during the day and some at night, which has a large effect on what plants are available to you, how you harvest sunlight (your resources), and what environmental obstacles you encounter. Interspersed among the regular levels are more arcade-like variations on the tower defense formula. You may lose the ability to select plants and instead deal with pre-selected weapons that come down a conveyor belt. Or you may be presented with a lawn full of vases waiting to be smashed – some hiding treasure, some zombies. There are even fun mini-games, a survival mode, and puzzles that let you play as the zombies. You can't go more than a few minutes with this game without discovering something new and delightful.

Adding to the game's charm is the cast of zombies, ranging from dancing Michael Jackson types straight out of the Thriller music video to aquatic zombies that ride dolphins (you have a pool in the backyard). The undead are amusingly animated and the game looks great in action. These aren't your gruesome Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil zombies. This is a zombie game for the whole family (never thought I'd say that).

Plants vs. Zombies also has a catchy, organic soundtrack that becomes more intense as your yard is flooded with enemies. The light voice acting gives the undead character as they lurch toward your house grunting and moaning for brains.