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A lot of people have a surprising desire to conquer the world. I happen to be one of them. Dreams of world domination are probably why war-playing games are so popular. Which is why this review of a computer game is relevant to war-gamers. The game in question, Alpha Centauri, has all the elements of a classic war-playing game: it is turned base and allows you to customize your soldiers and war machine. The game also has elements of role-playing: shrewd diplomacy and putting your efforts towards things other than your war machine can also aid you in winning (and theoretically allow you to win without any of that messy conquest).

Before I continue with my review, however, I should take a moment to point out Alpha Centauri's relationship to another, older game that proved to be extremely popular: Civilization II. The reason I mention this is because it was created by Sid Meier, whose name is proudly part of the Alpha Centauri title despite the fact Brian Reynolds created it. There is a reason that Sid's name is there. For all intent and purposes, Alpha Centauri IS Civilization III, only Sid doesn't have the rights to the name. I point this out so players who enjoyed Civ II can take a look at this game. It plays like Civ II, only with vast improvements in both interface and graphics.

Now that that's out of the way, let me go on:

Alpha Centauri is a game that is, to put it bluntly, extremely complicated. It is so complex, in fact, that it comes with a hefty 249-page manual! But don't be scared by that. Just do what the manual suggests: load the game and start playing it right away. On its easiest mode (which I highly suggest starting with) tutorial boxes pop up as you play to explain what things are and do. If these are insufficient, you should then go to the manual and read about what you want to know. But be warned: even after playing and winning the game, I still don't have a clue what some things did nor how certain things worked!

The game's story is fairly straightforward. Long ago the U.N. decided it would be nice to expand the human race beyond Earth. To accomplish this, they sent a hoard of people on a single explorer ship with the purpose of finding another world that can be colonized. Unfortunately, after years of travel, the people on board this ship began to have philosophical differences. Some wanted to make war, others improve the environment, and still others create a world with a single monopolistic economy. When the journey ends, the people on board have split into seven major factions.

The game actually begins at the point where the ship has just crashed (well, something had to happen to it). Unless you use a pre-made scenario, you begin the game by choosing which faction you want to belong to (the U.N. Peacekeepers are the one I used, after several failed attempts with the militaristic Spartans). Then you choose the level of difficulty and can even customize the world you're going to inhabit if you so choose. Once you've decided that, you get a single "colony pod" that, with the touch of the "B" button, becomes your first city. With this first city you build more colony pods (that turn into more cities), weapons of war, things to terraform the land, and a whole pile of technology that I'm not going to go over here.

Not too long after you get started, you'll begin to make contact with other factions. This is where the real fun begins. Some factions will want to be your allies and others who want to wipe you off the face of the planet. The biggest diplomatic decisions come when you befriend two factions that happen to hate one another. Each has a habit of demanding that you break off relations with the other and attack them. When diplomacy fails--and it often does--it usually results in war. This is not a war game per se (like Starcraft or Warcraft II), but military conflicts are fun nonetheless (and my favorite part of the game). Wars are also notably extremely slow. Each game turn represents a year, and sometimes wars can take up to one hundred or more turns (thus years--that's a mighty long time).

Despite the fact that you're forced to fight whether you want to or not, there are actually four ways to win the game and only one of them is military conquest. Each type of win is worth more points than the next, so I'll list them in order of value from least to greatest. To win, you can conquer all your enemies, get elected supreme leader of the planet (the way I won), create an economic monopoly, or develop your science so far that it enables you to evolve the entire human race. The higher the points a type of win give you, the harder it is to achieve as well.

The only real complaint I have about this is its complexity. There is far too much going on, and a lot of game features should have been left out altogether for easier game play. Even with the manual and the tutorial, there is just too much to learn and a lot of things I never found useful. I never found a way to take complete control over which technology I wanted to research next (which you can do in Civ II). I also found the upgrading technology business a bit too tedious. Sometimes a dialogue box would pop up offering to allow me to upgrade my technology automatically, but most of the time it didn't. If there is a way to get this dialogue box up without waiting for it, I never found it. I also didn't like the drones and drone riots. They're meant to force you to build things that cater to making your population happy, but with all the other things going on, I could have done without this.

Still, on the whole this game was very fun and I highly recommend it. The best part about it is that it offers a number of scenarios so you can play it multiple times and not get sick of it. Most of the pre-made scenarios are meant for multi-player games, though. It's really worth the $40 I spent to buy it.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)