It seems like just yesterday that SkyNet's older brother Joshua almost started a little global-thermonuclear war. Well, more like twenty three years, but Wargames still remains an early classic of evil videogames in movies, and it clearly left an impression on the designers at Introversion. So much so that I imagine only fears of legal retribution prevented them from naming Defcon: "Wargames: The Game." (And of course, the fact that they already made a game out of Wargames some time ago.) That having been said, anybody who has seen Wargames has already seen Defcon.
Defcon is a game of nuclear war that doesn't pretend survival is possible. Case in point: the URL for the game is everybody-dies.com and they aren't joking.
Every game begins with up to 6 players "human or computer" each assuming the role of a geographic region on the globe (political parties are conspicuously absent). Obviously, each is armed to the hilt with all manner of nuclear weapons, and the world is irrevocably careening towards all out war.
Starting at Defcon 5, everybody prepares for the impending nuclear exchange. The Defcon timer continuously counts down and upgrades the Defcon when certain time limits are reached, depending on how the players choose to set the variable game clock: with forgiving slowness or draconian haste. Players all have the same armaments and have until Defcon 3 to place them all on the map. These armaments include silos, naval ships, radar arrays and airbases. At Defcon 3, anything that isn't placed is lost, adding a twitch element to the game.
Defcon 3 is when you can start scouting out enemy territory to find where their defenses are hidden and, if you please, having open warfare between the three types of naval vessels: battleships, carriers, and submarines. But no nukes yet! Nukes are saved for the family favorite Defcon 1, and, before long, the missiles are flying and players get to see how "everybody dies." So what's the point?
While in Wargames the computer learned that "the only winning move is not to play," Introversion begs to differ. As such, they have instituted a scoring mechanism. Although the scoring can be altered, the default is that for every 1 million people you wipe out, you get two points, for every million you lose, you lose 1 point. So potential nuclear winter aside, you can apparently win a nuclear war by virtue of points. Although a massive oversimplification of its subject matter, it is this very simplicity, "the reduction of nuclear war to a win/lose situation" that makes Defcon work as a game. The designers seemed to have realized this as they not only simplified the concept, but they simplified everything.
In Defcon, there is a single objective: decimate populations while protecting your own; there are only a handful of units to worry about, some that work passively without any user input; there are even fewer options for attacking other players, with nukes having only a few potential targets; even the graphics and audio, both of which deserve further praise, reflect the stripping down of the concept.
The graphics are straight out of Wargames and the only way they could be more perfect for the game would be if Defcon came with an actual vector monitor, but the softly glowing wireframes do a fantastic job of evoking the atmosphere. Similarly, the audio is spectacular in its emptiness and never fails to ratchet up the tension, whether it be from the person coughing periodically, the "launch detected" klaxons that seem to erupt continuously once the first missile has been fired, or the eminently disturbing woman that can be heard crying now and again over the soft hum of machines.
However, when played in its most simplistic form, as a straight combat game, Defcon is quite mediocre. Everybody places their military infrastructure and everybody launches their attacks. Things explode, people die, somebody wins. If you're looking for a pseudo-arcade style game of nuclear war, then Defcon can fit the bill, but there are only so many missiles one can launch before you start thinking like the computer in Wargames: what's the point? That is where diplomacy enters.
Defcon features the ability to have strategic alliances between players. Any number of players may be allied, and there may be any number of alliances, but each player may only belong to one alliance at a time. Additionally, you can have an optional cease fire in an alliance, which means that your alliance could only be hanging together by threads. And everybody knows that the bane of a thread's existence is a thermonuclear warhead.
It is through the cold war aspect of the diplomatic meta-game that Defcon manages to go beyond its simple gameplay. If you rush to nuclear apocalypse, you are going to be left all alone and everybody else will bomb you to pieces. However, if you play the diplomacy game, you can get your allies to do the work for you, leaving them ripe for a well placed betrayal; but they all know that too. Needless to say, the paranoia level when the game is played in this fashion is like a little slice of terror. The complexity of a firmly entrenched diplomatic game can result in a lengthy prelude to the first missile launch, at which point you get to see how well your allies have been chosen.
The game itself is quite versatile so you can play the game with straight up alliances, no alliances, a single game start alliance that includes all players, and more. You can also alter the scoring so that either killing or saving becomes the primary scoring criterion. Despite all these options, the most memorable games have always come from the deep levels of diplomacy that can occur when sufficiently devious players match wits; in those games, even when you come out on the radiated (i.e. losing) end of things, it is still entertaining, even if infuriating.
As a quick game of nuclear holocaust, Defcon is good. As a not-so-quick game of diplomacy, Defcon is a very good game. However, given how successful the diplomacy meta game is, I can't help but feel that the inclusion of some more details, some more units, some more something, may have resulted in an even more intense game. As it stands, Defcon remains limited as even hardcore players may eventually grow tired of the constant genocide without any victory other than points. Still, at Defcon's bargain price of $15, anybody that doesn't mind a game where everybody dies should definitely give it a shot.
