OK, that’s the good stuff, now on to the bad. First of all, the game’s
tutorial is simplistic and annoyingly repetitive, and narrated the whole time by
someone with one of the stranger accents you’ll ever hear. The single player
campaign is wrapped in one of the lamest and amateurish stories to appear in a
game for some time, and the narrative is spoken by static portraits of the
game’s characters and the forced and feeble dialog is given voice by actors with
what can be generously described as a wooden delivery. Imagine a story written
by an eight year old, edited by an average high school kid, and then brought to
life by junior high school actors and you’ll get the picture.
 |
| Some battles can involve a lot of units. |
Another issue with the game is that its scenarios and campaign missions play
out too much like puzzles. This limits their replay value as there is not a lot
of room to try out new strategies and there is not much of an element of
randomness. It’s like the difference between solving chess puzzles and actually
playing chess. The game does have a less-constrained mode – World War – and this
provide greater replay appeal as they do not contain scripted events and you can
vary your starting forces. If you’d rather play another human, the game supports
both LAN and hot seat play. There is internet play, but it takes the form of
play by mail where you complete a turn and then email it off to your opponent so
that he or she can import it and then do his or her turn. This last option is
initially free, but then you must pay a monthly fee in order to keep playing. I
suppose that some people would be willing to pay to play a game by email, but
with the plethora of strategy games that can be played for free on the internet
it’s hard to recommend paying for this option.
The game can be recommended to those looking for a simple yet deep strategy
game that runs at a slower pace. I’d say that it would make an excellent tool
for training young strategic thinkers, but for some reason there’s an inordinate
amount of cursing in the game’s campaign game and I can see some parents taking
an issue with this when it comes to their own young gamers. As for you older
strategy gamers you’ll just have to ask yourself if the game’s throwback
gameplay and simple rules are appealing enough to you that you’re willing to put
up with the game’s poor presentation and puzzle-like nature.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
67%. Domination is a game for those yearning for the days of strategy
gaming’s board game roots.
System Requirements: Pentium III 750 MHz; 256 MB RAM;
32 MB
Video RAM; 24x CD-ROM; 570 MB Hard Drive
Space; Mouse.
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