Dark Reign 2

This game is a bit like the missing link between Command and Conquer and Warcraft 3. For an early 3D effort this still looks glossy and has tons of personality. I was surprised how smoothly and stably this ran in any resolution! The campaigns are voiced well. The situations are intriguing. You need to stagger your unit creation so unlike some RTS games you can't just mass produce a bunch of ground units to overwhelm anything and your base building is much more effective than other games thanks to energy walls branching between sentry gun placements. The first Dark Reign had a few more options, but for a classic this is a meaty and not horrible to look at experience!

Amazing story, beautiful soundtrack and fun gameplay. Though I am already a bit biased having played this gem way back when it was only a year old at the time, its still a great game to this day. Got a bone to pick with some of the reviews though. Lots of people in the reviews talk about the controls, gameplay and movement issues but really, the unit movements and paths are the real problems that should be cause for concern. At $6, the soundtrack alone pays for it. Reguardless, I know these are the same people that play modern RTS games that allow you to "attack move" a bunch of units in one directions and forget about them, if you do this in this game, you will lose all those units. Surprise, this game takes a little strategy, correct unit placement and managment. Having 3 or 4 groups of units with heavy hitters in front and healers at the ready will win the battles, but its actual strategy moves like pincer attacks, flanking, finding weak spots in defenses, using air units well, using spies well, and focusing on the acutal objective that wins the war. As mentioned the soundtrack alone is worth the money. Even if you never played this game, go have a listen yourself on youtube.

I love this game and played it when it still had it's multiplayer. WON shut them down. Sad. Actually the source code of the game is available so why not take a look and try to fix all the problems it has?

Dark Reign 2 is a decent RTS game, but for a number of reasons (some well deserved) it never became a popular title. Personally, after playing the masterpiece that was Dark Reign, this second installment is poor in almost every aspect. The attempt to go for hi-tech graphics largely misfired because while the engine may be advanced the actual graphics are not very good. Whereas the first game actually looked good, the scenery was pleasing to the eye the second game is a lot more barren and jaggedy. I also felt that the first game was truly ground-breaking, a lot of the mechanics that they used are today considered the norm for RTS games, for example being able to set your unit's behavior, not just aggressive/neutral/defensive but also set the point when your units flee to heal up, or even if they flee at all. The ability to set patrol routes for your units was another thing I haven't seen in any previous games. But I think the biggest reason DR2 didn't really take off is that it was released around the time when RTS was going really strong as a genre. With titles like C&C, Warcraft, Starcraft, along with a slew of other RTS and TBS games there simply was no fan-base to really make DR2 a lasting franchise. All in all this is not a game I would recommend to anybody but big fans of the original Dark Reign, and then only because it carries the same name. When Dark Reign did a lot of new and original things, Dark Reign 2 just follows the general formula set by earlier RTS titles.

Dark Reign 2's problems aren't in the graphics, storyline, or tech trees. Its the fact that it doesn't do anything exceptionally well yet it does its damndest to stand on its own two legs. Map designs are memorable but with heavy repetition grow old after a while. Despite that its fun to create new tactics each time you play. Sometimes simply overpowering the enemy won't be enough. If you want to play a skirmish map on something new, there are still sites online that offer dozens of community-made maps. The graphics are dated even for the time but (and I can vouch for this because I still have the game disc and I first played a Windows Me PC) it never lags, never glitches, and never crashes. The storylines, both of them from the viewpoints of the opposing factions, are long and as they progress deeper they show more and more of the desperate situation that the earth is in. The gameplay offers a decent variety of units which are unlocked through a rather clunky tech tree but are different enough to keep things interesting. Air-strike player? You can do that. Resource hog? Keep building. Excessive use of low-tier soldiers? Its possible. Moving large amounts of forces is unfortunately a terrible process for two reasons: you can't group forces together and some of the maps are too narrow to move several rows through at once. This causes a traffic jam that puts the first-to-arrive on the chopping block. In spite of all of its flaws, the atmospheres, music, and presentation all make it worth checking out. It can't hold a candle to the RTS's of the same age, but it is fun even after all these years.