Cyberjudas

How many of you remember a game from a while back called Shadow President which was developed by a little-known development team called DC True? Some of you may, but there's a very good chance that it may have slipped a lot of you by. Rest assured it was quite good, but it never really made an impact. Why is this important? Well, this is the sequel. There you go, history lesson over...

...On to the game

Basically, the idea behind the game is that you are the president of the USA. When push comes to shove, this makes you possibly the most powerful man on earth and you are quite spectacularly armed with money, weapons and "influence". Gathered around you are your minions from the various governmental organisations, such as the CIA, and everything would be completely hunky-dory if presidential life was trundling along as normal. Unfortunately, it's not. For not only do you have the political balance of the globe on your hands, you are now faced with the possibility that one of your most trusted compatriots is actually a stinking, rotten cheat and a liar, too. Someone on your team is a baddy and you've got to winkle him out.

A broad view

The best way to describe Cyberjudas is as a sort of role-playing strategy game. The team behind the product has been extremely picky in the way it has put things together and the whole thing is constructed very much like a president simulator. From what we've seen of the game so far it would appear that when you start playing, you sort of "jack in" to a Cyber-president environment and control everything from a pseudo VR point-and-click interface thingy.

Using this interface you can access pretty much everything that you would expect a president to be able to access. You can pull files on certain world leaders, instigate trade agreements, authorise assassinations or even declare war (with everything from land attacks to nuclear strikes featured). All of your actions affects your political position and your standing in the opinion polls. If you want to stay in power, you not only need to keep the potential assassins and political backstabbers off your back, but you also have to remain a true "big smile" style president in the eyes of the electorate. This, of course, is only relevant if you want to play the game properly. If, however, you feel a desperate urge to nuke the buggery out of some where like, er, say, France, then you can do so with ease. You won't last long, but it's lots of fun.

Goodies Galore

On the techie front it's worth quickly mentioning that the whole thing has been rendered using the obligatory sgi workstation approach, and it all comes on CD and features oodles of speech and nice sampled sound effects.

On the fancy programming front DC True assures us that there is an extremely advanced artificial AI employed throughout and a great deal of attention has been paid to the behavioural elements of the numerous characters ydu encounter. For example, body language is very important throughout the game and is a good way of judging each of the characters.

Just so long as all goes according to plan things should be finished very soon and we'll be able to bring you a full review in a couple of months.