DEFCON: Global Nuclear Domination Game

The Good
The packaging is good, for what it's worth. I enjoyed getting the game for Christmas, and reading the manual. It's also pretty much bug free as far as I can see. Of course, if I had more to say good about it, I wouldn't have played it for a half hour before uninstalling it and putting it away.

The Bad
Do you remember the mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, “No Russian”, where you could, if you wanted to, gun down dozens of helpless civilians? If the virtue of a person were measured by how many helpless, innocent civilians he or she murders in games, a person who launched a single nuclear missile at a city in DEFCON would be 10,000 times worse than a person who gleefully shoots up the airport in “No Russian”. But that alone isn't what makes the game not enjoyable to play. You can nuke cities in Cornutopia's games Thermonuclear Domination and Radioactive, as well as the Civilization and Alpha Centauri series, and the Space Empire series allows you to kill hundreds of millions of people from orbit. The difference is that in all those games, there can be an ulterior motive for killing so many. In Thermonuclear Domination and Radioactive, a lucky strike on a city can win the game by destroying the enemy headquarters. In the other three series I mentioned, they can be used to destroy military forces and means of production. In DEFCON, you use nuclear weapons on cities for no reason but simple points.

That's the main reason it's not enjoyable, but it's also not, by and large, an accurate game. Nuclear weapons can't be used against formations of ships. ICBMs take exactly three hits by any other nuclear weapon to destroy. There's no difference between different yields - no tactical cruise missiles, no midrange SLBM or ICMBs, and no high-yield gravity bombs. There's no differentiation between what hits what, and what effects it has on it. Also, for no particular reason I can think of, the missile silos double as Anti-Ballistic Missile installations. While that alone makes no sense that both would be in the same location, it makes even less sense that there's a long delay between switching between them, like it's the Battle of Midway and I need technicians to remove one kind of weapon and attach another partway through the battle. Aren't there enough silos for everybody? Plus, in addition for there being no reason to hit cities aside from points, there aren’t any land military targets aside from radar dishes, airfields, and silos. If you're going to give the player points for destroying things, why not points for destroying Army bases? That would at least make a little more sense than points for destroying cities for no reason save points. And finally, as a minor gripe, it seems pretty much all the aircraft pilots are suicidal by nature. Rather than automatically turning back, or giving the player the option to have them automatically turn back when they reach half a tank of fuel, they won't turn back unless ordered. This leads to many, many cases of jets and bombers running out of fuel and crashing 50 miles from airbases and ships.

The Bottom Line
After I played Thermonuclear Domination and Radiation, and enjoyed those, I read the review in the magazine PC Gamer for DEFCON, and it sound like just a more advanced version of those games. So, I asked for it for Christmas, and got it. I found, to my dismay, that it was only fun for a few minutes. I started it up, updated it, and began the tutorial. There was no catchy tune in the game, only depressing, sleepy, boring, and sad music, which actually includes sniffling and crying as background sound effects. Further, as I started playing the tutorial, I started to see more and more things that were just game features by fiat of the developers. It's a game that starts in reality, but isn't a realistic depiction of how nuclear war would play out. Then I got to the final Tutorial mission. After destroying enemy defenses, the game asked me to nuke the enemy cities and “rack up some Megadeaths”. I did, but the first nuclear bomb only destroyed half the population of a city of 6 million. So, I nuked it again, and a few more times. Each time, the number decreased, but less and less each time, like I was either shooting cities with a Davy Crockett recoilless gun, or the survivors had turned into Supermen and could no longer be hurt by nuclear bombs. Then I realized I was killing hundreds of thousands of people in the game that offered no threat to me, just because the game asked me to. I felt like a monster, uninstalled the game, and put it away.

Don't buy this game. Whatever your misconceptions of what this came is about, know three things. First, it’s not a realistic game. Second, it's not very fun. Third, if you’ve read about it and read reviews, and are thinking of buying it because it's a game protesting a social ill, know that buying a game for such reason makes you a culture jammer or a hipster, and that that's a terrible reason to purchase anything. If that's your reason for thinking about buying this game, go watch the movie When the Wind Blows. That will show the horrors of nuclear war without asking you to be the one to push the button.