Review: Diplomacy for PC
If you are into turgid, slow-moving games, and have too much spare time and space on your hard drive, this could be the game for you. It is based on the popular board game of the same name, which I must admit never appealed to me, so I suppose this game was on a hiding to nothing as far as I was concerned. The title of this article gives you a link to Richard Sharp’s interesting and authoritative book about the original game, which I gather achieved cult status. Intriguingly, Sharp writes: "Try to surround yourself with people who trust you, then let them down; find an ally who will gladly die for you and see that he does just that." So I gave it a go...
A map of Europe is your chess board for this turn-based strategy game. There is a tutorial if you don’t want to take the time to read the manual, and take it from me, you’ll need to do one or the other because otherwise you’ll click on buttons and wonder what if anything is happening. There is nothing intuitive about the game play. And the repetitive grunts, ahems and coughs while the computer makes all the turns are so irritating I found it difficult to play for more than half an hour.
With the graphics capabilities afforded by modern-day PCs, you’d have thought they could do better than a three-dimensional view of arrows moving round a two-dimensional board. You might as well just get the board out, except that I suppose you can play on your own, or over the Internet. But I couldn’t play on my own, the coughs and grunts proved too much for me!
Perhaps I have missed the point, but I can’t help feeling that time spent learning how to play this game is time wasted. I certainly can’t see myself bothering to play a whole game - it takes five hours! I suppose the only thing we can be thankful for is that they have left Europe as being made up of only seven countries - just think how much longer it would take, and how long the grunts and ahems would go on for if they had brought it up to date.
Diplomacy is developed by Paradox Interactive and published by Mindscape. Bytes: Rebooted score - 2/10
A map of Europe is your chess board for this turn-based strategy game. There is a tutorial if you don’t want to take the time to read the manual, and take it from me, you’ll need to do one or the other because otherwise you’ll click on buttons and wonder what if anything is happening. There is nothing intuitive about the game play. And the repetitive grunts, ahems and coughs while the computer makes all the turns are so irritating I found it difficult to play for more than half an hour.
With the graphics capabilities afforded by modern-day PCs, you’d have thought they could do better than a three-dimensional view of arrows moving round a two-dimensional board. You might as well just get the board out, except that I suppose you can play on your own, or over the Internet. But I couldn’t play on my own, the coughs and grunts proved too much for me!
Perhaps I have missed the point, but I can’t help feeling that time spent learning how to play this game is time wasted. I certainly can’t see myself bothering to play a whole game - it takes five hours! I suppose the only thing we can be thankful for is that they have left Europe as being made up of only seven countries - just think how much longer it would take, and how long the grunts and ahems would go on for if they had brought it up to date.
Diplomacy is developed by Paradox Interactive and published by Mindscape. Bytes: Rebooted score - 2/10
posted by Graham at 9:57 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home