DefCon - A Game of Thermonuclear Nostalgia

I think it's been on all of our minds since the first time Matthew Broderick tried to hack into a new software company's system in order to get the latest games, and instead found himself in the main hard drive of the War Operation Planned Response's (W.O.P.R.) strategic preparedness system. On his old, green and black monitor he was playing a game that struck, at least everyone I've spoken to, as one of the most interesting potential games we'd seen in a good long time. Since then it has been the desire of many an amateur game developer to mimic such a game - however in that time those with the drive to make such a game have usually been scooped up by the blossoming, failing, or imminently successful gaming empires that dominate the industry today.

Introversion, referring to themselves as the "last of the bedroom programmers", has attempted to return to the fundamentally simple roots of Global Thermonuclear War in the creation of DEFCON - Global Nuclear Domination Game. At its simplest, it is a game where you hope to destroy the enemy in a nuclear show down that closely resembles the movies, using similarly simple graphics, colorful outlines depicting nations, and simplistic lines and plumes to denote the detonation of a missile of some sort.

Not hoping to forget the excellent question posed by Broderick's girlfriend "Are those your subs?" you also get to deploy nuclear submarines, battleships, and aircraft carriers to defend your waters with - or to take on the attack against your enemies. At the beginning of the game is what can be described as a deployment phase - you are allowed to distribute your radar, nuclear silos, air bases, and fleets. As the Defense Condition (DefCon) goes down from 5 to 1, you are allowed to take increasingly hostile behavior towards your opponents. At DefCon 5 no hostilities are permitted, at DefCon 4 you are allowed to navigate aircraft and fleets, 3 you can breach international waters and begin aerial engagements, and 1 allows you to unleash your deadliest arsenal in the form of nuclear weapons.

Your nuclear silos double as air defense platforms, and will attempt to shoot down both enemy jets (fighters and bombers), and inbound missiles. Once DefCon 1 is reached, you are also able to switch the "mode" of your missile silos from defense platforms to ICBM launching machines of death, capable of leveling cities with the populations of millions in single hits, lending credence to the claim on the back of the box stating it is "The only game that allows players to rain nuclear death on the enemy and rack up kill counts in the TENS OF MILLIONS!" In all honesty, I found the statement a little tactless and distasteful, propagating the idea that the highlight of this game is that you are allowed to target civilians with nuclear weapons, but I digress.

Ultimately the concept is sound, and it appealed greatly to me. It received a 9.0 rating from Editor's Rating, was marked as a PCGAMER Must Buy, and IGN.com gave it the Editors' Choice Award. None of these things really mattered to me, as in my time both working in the game industry and following it closely has taught me that there's little trust to be had in gaming websites, magazines, or videos, as they are more political than a presidential election. The only way to verify I'd like the game was to pull it out of the box and try it for myself.

In that the game was handled clumsily. I've always enjoyed games that try to immerse the player in the game's own little world. DEFCON attempts this by littering the manual with various "tips to survive fallout" and other immersive guides discussing how to survive a nuclear war. While I enjoy this in manuals, it was out of place, and took up room that could be spent explaining part of the game I spent time scratching my head about. True, it is not a very complex game, and the simple ones are usually the ones that require the most explanation. An example I can give is Caesar III - an ultimately complex game by many standards, but done so in such a logical way that once I understood the fundamentals, I was able to follow the tree of logic towards the various branching tasks.

When a game is deceptively simple in an industry we come to expect to produce complex games - or at least did in the mid 90's and early 21st century which is beginning to recede into simplicity - we need to be told as much what our limitations are as what each unit does.

I found my first frustration with the game was that it was not very clear whether it was meant to be a primarily online game akin to the Battlefield series put out by EA, or if it was meant to be a primarily single player strategy game akin to the Total War series put out by Creative Assembly. I ended up playing my first game by myself, wantonly nuking (without any consequence) Asia, Europe, and Africa in a vain search for enemies. On the second attempt I discovered how to populate my games with AI players - which ended in my United States being brought to its knees as Africa, Asia, and South America turned on me all at once.

The game is not deep or complex by any means, and it's obviously not meant to be. As IGN states it is "...simple yet bursting with depth". I would disagree on many points - what you see is what you get and there's nothing more to it. In many ways I had hoped that rather than simply simulating the graphics, we'd see various wartime scenarios and objectives as was depicted in Wargames - for example, a betrayal by Europe scenario, a missing dirty bomb scenario, an armed Iran scenario, etc. etc. each with their own objectives. Likewise I was hoping for a more political aspect, where you tried to ward off nuclear warfare - using it only as a last resort.

Tragically the titular aspect of the game, the DefCon itself, is little more than a deployment timer. Indeed, you have a certain amount of time, set before every game, to completely deploy your units before you're able to start nuking one another. After that there's no deployment, there's no negotiations, its may the best continent not lose all their cities.

I felt that in a game this simple to construct, it would have paid to allow more versatility, more objectives, and more consequences to your allowing cities to be decimated than a minus score.

Nevertheless, the game is enjoyable, and is of course replayable due to the heavy emphasis it puts on its multiplayer. Ultimately the game suffers from being a cross somewhere between Metal Marines and Battleship - yes the ancient game of yore we all used to play asking if we hit on E4 and the lying bastard would usually just put his ship elsewhere - where you frantically have to waste units to find your enemy's air defenses. Not to be mistaken, I enjoy the game, I feel it is a benefit to the gaming industry to see them returning to a simplistic idea, but I feel that its desire to be so simplistic has ultimately damaged the potential for a game that could have been one of the greats.

As it stands however, I'm disappointed that I paid $30 for what should be a $10 game.