It’s been a very long time since we have been as completely blown away by a game as we were with Defcon. Sure, it’s no virtual gem-swapper, and the subject matter is probably going to turn off a lot of people who play casual games, but work this good deserves to be seen as much as possible. Seriously, take a break from baking virtual cakes to have a look at a game that is as chillingly real as it is brilliant.
The basic idea is simple: you are one of the major powers on the brink of thermonuclear war. You place your radars, bases, fleets, and missile silos, and get ready for the big one. Extreme tension is created by using classic “fog of war” where you can only see what your radar sets can see, leaving half of the action in the dark corners of Africa, Asia, or South America. Instead of details on the enemy, you can only see vague “launch detected” warnings, leaving you to wonder where on earth the missiles are actually going. Submarines suddenly appear off the cost when they launch their weapons, and bombers only appear when they are headed directly for your cities, loaded with nukes. In many ways, the game is a complex and frightening version of “chicken”, where the first to launch their missiles has to destroy the enemy completely and absolutely, or be destroyed in the inevitable nuclear retaliation that they lay open and defenseless for.
The game can be played against the computer, but where it really shines is in multiplayer mode, where you can make treaties, set alliances, and otherwise engage in international backstabbing. The game will support up to 6 players, which is a whole lot of dying. In alliances, players share radar coverage, but only one player wins, so sooner or later, all treaties get broken. As they say: everybody dies.
What’s amazing is that a game that looks so simple, and has so few controls can be so enormously deep and compelling. There are only 3 nine units in the whole game, and a third of them don’t even move. Everything is controlled by a simple point and click interface that is deceptively simple; in fact, most of the units will work fine on their own, responding to attacks appropriately and defending themselves and your cities. This is no RTS clickfest – it is a game that asks you to think strategically, and does the rest itself.
The art style is perfect for the game: a dehumanized vector graphics computer screen that looks like it was ripped off the wall of a situation room at Norad. It’s not the most beautiful thing on earth, but it really makes you feel like a 4 star general chain smoking cigarettes in a bunker a few miles under the Ural Mountains. In fact, the muted music, vector graphics, and overall muted quality of the game gives it a lot of its creepiness. When you see one of the big white detonation blurs over New York or Paris, and hear the distant rumble as the game quiletly tells you that 14 million people just died, it is somehow far more disturbing than any more realistic depiction could ever be.
But what really gets you hooked is the relentlessly tense pacing. The game goes through increasing Defcon levels, with each level allowing more and more action, such as scrambling fighters to scout the enemy defenses, using bombers to take out radars and missile silos, and finally unleashing nuclear winter on those pesky foreigners. At each level, you scoot a little closer to the edge of your seat and get a little more nervous. You can slow the game way down, but you can never pause, never undo, and never call back your missiles. Like real life, once you commit to a nuclear war, you can’t go back, and have to ride it out to the end.
In a time of terrorism, color coded threat levels, endless foreign wars, and a million other things that keep us awake at night, it’s somehow good to step back to the 1980s and remember a time when the only threat was the complete annihilation of the earth through nuclear holocaust at the hands of cold heartless superpowers. Strange, but true.
In all seriousness, this is less a game and more a sort of psychological experiment in understanding the depth to which technology has taken us to the brink of complete self destruction. It seriously deserves you attention for a few hours, for educational value if nothing else.
Review by
Nick Kojima
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