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The Nations

Score: 80%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: JoWooD Productions
Developer: JoWooD Productions
Media: CD/1
Players: 1 - 8
Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Graphics & Sound:

The Nations uses a three-quarters view 2D display, which ends up suiting the game just fine. The buildings and the units are all rendered 3D, with enough graphical smoothing so that they don't look out of place on the flat textured lands. The game isn't drop-dead gorgeous, but neither is it ugly; it uses the graphics smoothing trick like Settlers IV to let you zoom in close on the action without everything looking horribly pixelated. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to rotate the view (if you can, even), so sometimes it's hard to see things behind buildings. Nonetheless, the graphics are nice, and each of the three different cultures has a distinctive style that's instantly noticeable. Strangely enough, this game has a habit of chugging even on my system at the default graphics level. Curious.

The same cannot be said for the sound, however. It's certainly passable, but for the most part the sound effects in the game are way too quiet, requiring you to zoom in close to hear what's really going on. I suppose that's part of the 'god's eye view' that you get, but it still seems a little strange. The music is solid, if not particularly memorable, and you won't find yourself humming it or turning it off. It works fine for the slower pace of the game.


Gameplay:

And let it be known that The Nations is definitely a slow-paced game. It's not your standard RTS; it takes almost all of its cues from the Settlers series of games, down to the various groups with their little differences and the de-emphasis of combat. Instead, The Nations concentrates on getting a working economy going, with a large number of different products and various methods of getting new and better ones that are more useful for your people.

Basic gameplay is simple, and you can get a basic grasp on what's going on by running through the short tutorial. The basic idea is that you click where you want to build a building, and a foreman will come up and start working on it. Runners will deposit the raw materials needed to construct the building as well. They also do the rest of the 'movement' in the game, hustling goods from the storehouses to the taverns, from the lumberyards to the places that need the planks, and so on. You train the various types as you need them, although you're always limited in numbers by the growth of your population. Each 'day' in the game passes, and your babies grow up to be teenagers, quickly becoming viable adults who can hold jobs and get married, having kids and propogating the cycle.

Because of the emphasis on flow and structure instead of simple unit-swarming, there's a lot of micromangement to be done in this game. You have to make sure that you have enough lumberjacks and stonecutters to get the raw resources you need, then you have to make sure that you have enough runners to get the goods where they need to go. Along with that, you need to produce food, provide housing for the adults, and even build houses of worship for them to go to and pray. The interconnections of the game are elaborate, and it takes some time to figure out the best way to finagle it to do what you want.

You see, like in Settlers, you can't select most of the 'units' in the game. Instead, they're autonomous, going about their business and doing their jobs without any real say-so from you. The only group of units that you can select are the warriors, who you use to attack enemies. The rest are run by simple AI. You can set preferences on various buildings and locations--chop these trees down first, make sure to get the lumber from here, don't walk out to this well--and so on, but it's more SimCity and less Warcraft II.

There are three sides that you can play as--the Amazons, the Pimmon (a sort of goofy blue species) and the Sajiki, who look like big bugs. Each have their own unique things that they can do, but the core gameplay is identical for all three sides. There's one campaign for each side, along with a number of skirmish missions that you can play against the AI or with your friends in multiplayer. The AI is scattered in its ability; it has a habit of building useless structures when it should be doing everything it can to defend from your attacks, but it's competent enough.

There are some frustrations. The translation is definitely weak, with a large amount of weird grammar and even some German hanging around (fur with an umlaut instead of 'for' in a few places, f'rinstance). And, more frustratingly, the campaigns aren't cumulative; after spending hours developing a city in a plotline, I don't really feel like re-researching all of the stuff to make the city again. Grumble.


Difficulty:

A lot of the difficulty of The Nations comes from figuring out just how all of the mechanics of the game mesh together. Once you have that down, the rest of the game is fairly easy. Sure, it's a little too easy to run out of resources on some of the maps, making for a very frustrating game, but for the most part the game plays quite well and most veteran gamers shouldn't have too many problems with playing any of the scenarios.

Game Mechanics:

The game is completely mouse-controlled, as games of this genre typically are. The interface is simple enough to learn, although I found myself clicking wrong icons a little too often for my tastes, even after having played the game for a number of hours. I'm sure there could have been a more intuitive way of doing it than the double-tabbed structure, but the way that it is definitely cuts down on used screen space. The core mechanics of the game work well enough, with all of the economic underpinnings of the game meshing nicely. I really wish that the stonecutters and lumberjacks were a little more intelligent with their choices of places to work, because they have a habit of going miles away from your area to get to resources, completely ignoring the grove of trees right outside of your town. Load times are minimal, and the game even autosaves for you every so often just in case you forget to.

It's nothing particularly revolutionary--something of a more humourous Settlers or Seven Kingdoms II--but The Nations has plenty of fun for such a 'little' game. While the translation could use some work, and the campaign structure is a mite annoying, any fan of the sort of slow-paced strategy that you find in this subgenre would do well to give the game a look.


-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications
AKA Phil Bordelon

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows 95/98, PII 350, 32 MB RAM, 3D video card, 4X CD, 300 MB free hard drive space, sound card, mouse.
Recommended: Windows ME or 2000, PIII 500, 64 MB RAM, DirectX 7/8 compatible 3D video card with 32 MB RAM, 20X CD, 300 MB free hard drive space, DirectX compatible sound card, mouse.
 

Test System:



Athlon 1.1GHz running Win98 SE, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2 GTS w/ 32MB RAM, SoundBlaster Live!, 8x DVD-ROM

Nintendo 64 Ogre Battle 64 Windows Oni

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated