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Games for the Thinking Player: A list of the best strategy gamesMay 02 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line A list of the best (and worst) strategy games around, with a brief explanation of what is special about each.
Here are my picks for the best strategy games, broken down by category. For more information on any of these games, check out my review on the product’s page. CIVILIZATION STYLE GAMES For those who like a really big challenge. You start with a small tribe, from which you build cities, establish an economy, trade with your neighbors, amass an army, and generally try to dominate the planet. BEST GAME IN CATEGORY: Alpha Centauri: One of the best designed games I’ve ever run across. In it, you play one of seven different factions that has landed on a new world, and is try to carve out a society in a hostile environment. It has all the best elements of Civilization 2, plus some nice additional features: Each faction has a unique ideology and special abilities. Units are customizable, and can be upgraded to make use of new technologies. There are unique terrain features with cool properties. The political system has been expanded. And computer players can now surrender and become client states of yours. The Alien Crossfire expansion pack brings in some more nice features and is a good buy, but is not necessary to enjoy the game. RECOMMENDED: Civilization 2: For those who would rather play in a historical milieu. This is still a very good game, though it lacks some of the nice features of the more recent Alpha Centauri Game. NEUTRAL OPINION: Civilization 2: Test of Time: It adds some features to Civilization 2, but doesn’t really improve it. You now play on multiple maps, and can play science fiction or fantasy based scenarios, but none of these have quite the engaging game play of the original. NEUTRAL OPINION: Civilization: Fantastic Worlds: A set of new scenarios for Civilization 2. Unfortunately, they are rather transparent overlays of new icons and new names over the basic Civilization engine. A couple of the scenarios are interesting, particularly the “World of H.G. Wells”, but there’s not much replay value here. AVOID: Civilization: Call to Power 2 Despite some interesting features, this game is just a mess. It doesn’t even look like the designers playtested it. In fact, given that they’ve left in some major problems from Call to Power 1, I doubt that they ever got around to playtesting the game's predecessor, either. The game is prone to frequent crashes, there are whole sections of the rules that make no sense, and the documentation is the worst that I have ever seen in any game. FANTASY STRATEGY GAMES So you want to be a wizard and conquer the world, huh? Try these. RECOMMENDED: Lords of Magic, Special Edition This is a game with a few major problems, but a lot of nice features. On the good side, it has the best tactical combat system of any game in this genre, plus a good mix of interesting spells, cool magic items, and bizarre fantastic units. On the bad side, the computer players behave extremely stupidly on the strategic level, and the first few turns are extremely tough. (See my review of this game for hints on surviving the games difficult opening.) Still, I’ve played this game a number of times and continue enjoy it. RECOMMENDED: Master of Magic: An older game, but still very enjoyable. It plays a bit more like the Civilization Games, but with magic added in. It’s biggest weakness is that the computer controlled players have a weak grasp of strategy. MAGIC THE GATHERING A unique and highly enjoyable game. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the card game, you play a mage whose powers come from a deck of spell “cards”. The strategy comes in choosing which spells to include in your deck, since both you and your opponent’s spells work interact with each other i all sorts of interesting ways. Basically, you wander around the world, engaging in mage duels with mystical creatures, trying to build up a sufficiently powerful collection of cards to go after the five guildmasters(one for each of the five elements of magic) and the big heavy who is threatening the world. Once you get bored with the original game (which should take a long time), the expansion pack SPELLS OF THE ANCIENTS adds some new spells to the system. AVOID: Disciples: Patterned loosely after the “Heroes of Might and Magic” games, you play through a pre-determined set of scenarios. The game has two major problems: First, the tactical level is dull as oatmeal. There are almost no decisions to make, and it’s just a lot of clicking and waiting for the battle to play out. Second, the magic system is badly thought out. While there are a lot of cute animations to accompany the spells, there is little variation to what they actually do. Furthermore there are serious balance problems, since there are lots of ways to kill a stack with magic, but few ways to defend against it. All in all, the graphics are pretty but the play is awfully dull. AVOID: Heroes of Might and Magic III I know I’ll take some flack for this one, because the game is hugely popular. But really, the play just isn’t that good. I played the original version years ago, back on an old black and white Mac. But with every new version, they’ve added more bells and whistles, to the point that the basic game is buried under all their weight. For example, just moving each of your heroes around to take advantage of the NUMEROUS freebies (free experience, free spells) available to them on the map becomes a major chore. Sometimes more is less. SQUAD LEVEL TACTICAL GAMES Lead a squad of soldiers as they move through buildings fighting monsters, aliens, and Brazilian Cultists. RECOMMENDED Shadow Watch A surprisingly under-appreciated game, but by far the best in this category. You have a squad of six characters, each with unique abilities, and their own special skills they can learn. For example, your explosives expert can learn to blow apart doors, while your martial artists can learn stealth. The individual missions have a lot of variety, as you lead your team against everything from Chinese gangsters to corrupt Russian Army officers, to rogue agents of the Brazilian space agency. A highly engaging game with a lot of replay value. RECOMMENDED: X-Com Apocalypse The third game in the X-Com series, it’s similar to the other two. You lead squads of soldiers against an alien menace. On the plus side, the strategic level is a lot of fun: You capture aliens, dissect them in your laboratory, and figure out how their science works. On the minus side, the tactical missions get to be rather repetitive, and I got bored with them before finishing the game. Still, I got a number of hours of enjoyment out of it. AVOID: Jagged Alliance 2 I really wanted to like this game, but it’s just too badly though out. Weapons aren’t sufficiently lethal or accurate, so fire fights tend to drag on and on and on. Overall game balance isn’t very good, and the gamely isn’t that engaging. AVOID: Fallout Tactics As a fan of Fallout 2, I was really looking forward to this game. Unfortunately, the game engine has major problems. For example, NPC’s will only react to your presence if they can see you on their turn. This means that you can endlessly pop up from behind cover and shoot them, then pop back down, and they won’t do anything about it. They won’t move to line up a shot on you, they won’t hold an action to shoot at you when you reappear, they won’t even move to take cover. They just stand there like idiots and take it. A surprisingly bad follow up to a great game. SPACE EXPLORATION GAMES RECOMMENDED: Master of Orion 2 An older title, but still head and shoulders above anything else in the category. Cool alien races, an interesting tech tree, and really nice tactical ship combat engine. I played it many times before I got sick of it. AVOID: Star Trek: Birth of the Federation What were they thinking when they designed this game? The interface is absolutely horrible: it requires you to keep checking up on things that the computer should be giving you alerts about. The diplomacy system is annoying, and the tactical level is a transparent version of “Rock, Papers, Scissors”. Most annoying, the tech tree makes NO sense at all. For example, researching advance photon torpedoes doesn’t seem to improve your ships, but it does allow you to build advanced universities. Huh? Somebody was on drugs when they wrote this one. SHIP TO SHIP COMBAT RECOMMENDED: Starfleet Command: Although technically a real time strategy game, the speed of this game can be reduced to the point that you can think about what you’re doing. The game isn’t perfect: it crashes often, some of the scenarios are extremely unbalanced, and the ships maneuver in two dimensions rather than three. However, it is extremely engaging, has a nice variety of tactical situations, and will challenge your command abilities. One of the few Star Trek games that really lives up to the series. AVOID: Sea Dogs: An exceedingly badly designed game. There’s little variety in the tactical situations that come up in the game, so every fight tends to feel the same. Also, there is an under-developed role-playing engine that’s been tacked on to it, as well as a ridiculously primitive arcade style fencing simulation that comes up when you board a ship. You have to wonder if the folks who designed this game ever bothered to play it. REAL TIME STRATEGY I realize that I’m in the minority, but I have never found a single game in this genre that I like. Overall, I find that the play tends to resemble arcade games more than true games of strategy. You are so busy clicking around, frantically trying to take care of everything, that there’s time for only the most basic of strategic decision: attack right or left, build ships or tanks, etc. There’s no time to plot an elegant bit of strategy, or to even think much about what you’re doing. Not to be snobbish, but these are games for the fingers, not games for the mind.  |
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by Mike_Bracken
by xeno3998
