Ever since Osama bin Laden showed he was serious business in 2001, nuclear war has become less a threat to human existence and more a quaint concept from the old days of Commies and big city dividing walls. Although America will continually make us fear every North Korean nuclear weapons test or Iran’s evil scheme of becoming a developed nation through a nuclear power plant program, possibly in the hopes to distract us from the fact that America is the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons against a civilian populace. But Introversion Software, the self proclaimed “last of the bedroom developers”, wanted to return to the fun side of nuclear holocaust with DEFCON, a game where you don’t really win but lose the least and keep score on your perfect genocide.
There is no plot, story or narrative in the game, which is probably so things don’t need to be explained like “why doesn’t the United Nations exist?” or “How can Africa, a largely impoverished continent, have a fully stocked nuclear stockpile?”, so feel free to make up your own context and motivation. When you start a game you select one of six territories which are the continents of the Earth. Well, kind of, since Russia isn’t really a continent and Latin America isn’t usually part of South America. You play on a map based around 1980’s vector graphics and those neon lit giant maps you see in every evil genius’ lair and is reminiscent of the films WarGames and Dr. Strangelove, and the differences between each territory is size and number of cities.
At the start of the game you start building three different type of buildings; the airbase allows you to deploy bombers and fighters, as well as having a reserve of five short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM); radar dishes that increase your field visions; and missile silos which have two modes for you to choose from, attack mode where you can launch ten intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) or defence mode where they can fire surface-to-air missiles against enemy planes and missiles. You also have to place naval fleets made up of six ships; aircraft carriers that are basically mobile airbases and are effective against enemy submarines; battleships are effective against enemy naval ships as well as enemy aircraft; and submarines which are undetected by radar unless you choose to launch the sub’s five nukes. The gameplay is based on the DEFCON alert system of the United States Armed Forces in which the alert level increases overtime and allow certain actions; at DEFCON 5, you can only build and place units; at DEFCON 3, you are allowed to attack via fighters and ships; and at DEFCON 1 allows the launch of all nuclear weapons. The basic objective, or only objective, is to kill as many of the enemy’s population while trying to avoid massive casualties on your own side, and your score is kept both awesomely and hauntingly as ‘mega deaths’.
I don’t think I can comment on the soundtrack since there is barely is any music in the game. During a match, the background music is a constant soulful and creepy piano solo, mixed with screams, coughs and women crying. It can definitely help set the mood of the game and it’s just strange that the game can do that so effectively with just one song constantly played on the lead designer's Yamaha keyboard.
The main problem with DEFCON is that each match is a bit too short and the only way to lengthen each one is by slowing down the game’s speed. And because each match is short, you are going to play lots of matches and may get the niggling feeling of repetition. There’s very little variety in each match, but because the game is so cheap, it’s not that big of a problem.
While DEFCON does suffer from repetition and can get boring when playing for a prolonged amount of time, it’s very cathartic in its simple objective. No matter if you’re a pro-feminist, liberal, vegan, hippie member of CND and Greenpeace who thinks that all nuclear weapons are bad and have no benefits, except for stopping countries invading Israel, there’s some kind of joyful, if morbid feeling in pressing a big red button that begins the nuclear holocaust and boasting that you won a single game by killing over 700 million human beings and only lost 500 million of your own people. This game is extremely cheap and extremely fun, get it and repress the genocidal sociopath inside you.
I’m Random Internet Critic and I criticise it because it's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
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