Padchuckr

In preparation for nuclear war, NATO uses a set pattern of alerts which must be passed, before the unholy massacre can begin in earnest. As these DEFense CONditions tick down through 5 to 1world can do little more than wait helplessly for the infernal fireworks to begin.

Every game of DEFCON starts at DEFCON 5, otherwise known as peace, which allows you five minutes to place your game pieces within your territory. Your mission, as nutter in charge of weapons of mass destruction, is to annihilate the enemy and at the same time protect your loyal citizenship.

The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction states that you can’t win a nuclear war, because both sides will suffer insurmountable casualties. Not winning, however, makes for a rubbish game. In DEFCON you can craft, wheedle, and zaporise your way to a crushing victory.

DEFCON 4 starts the war machine rolling, and your military assets will start looking for prospective targets via radar. DEFCON 3 opens the way for air and naval combat, so you get another six minutes within which to conquer the seas. If you can manage that, then you can manoeuvre your aircraft carriers and submarines within striking distance of your enemy’s population centres.

True to the methodology of nuclear war, you get your rewards from annihilating your enemy without mercy, exploding nuclear bombs over their major cities. You can’t start sending missiles out until DEFCON 1, though, and meanwhile your enemy plays similar tricks to try to get their submarines and carriers within range of your all important Radar and Anti-Aircraft defences.

When the klaxon for DEFCON 1 sounds you’re free to start hitting your big red button of mass destruction as often as you want until your limited supply of nuclear warheads is exhausted. The twist to the game is that your missile silos also double as your defence system, so firing your missiles leaves you unprotected. Even worse, when it launches a salvo, the silo appears on your enemy’s screen.

If your enemy’s won the naval battle this gives them the perfect opportunity to use their subs and aircraft carriers to destroy both your offences and your defences before you’ve had a chance to unleash the requisite level of fiery death.

Although you can subject computer opponents to this fate, DEFCON is at heart an online multiplayer game. Up to six people can battle for the domination of a scorched world over the internet or a LAN. Unlike many other multiplayer games DEFCON doesn’t support many of the things that can make playing RTS online irritating.

Because weapons are locked, and resources are equally allocated at the start of the game, there’s none of the rushing play that you see in Dawn of War or Command and Conquer. So you the game doesn’t revolve solely around your macro skills. This, and the stylishly basic Vector Graphics, might explain why DEFCON is quite relaxing to play with human opponents.

It also seems to limit the depth the game has, as there aren’t many tricks that you can use against your opponents. A good game can be tense, but it’s unlikely to provide more than a few hours of fun every now and again. Even when using the larger map sizes, where you get double the amount of military units, the gameplay still reverts to the same formula of a quick scrap in the sea followed by a flurry of nukes. And unsurprisingly, there’s only one map.