Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3

I liked Dominion well enough when I first started playing it, and I still think it’s a tolerable real time strategy game, but there’s just not all that much that’s unique about it. It excels in the area of mission balance and a solid realization of the game world, but it also looks a whole lot like Command and Conquer and Starcraft without the sophistication of either, with a few mechanized walkers reminiscent of the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars thrown in.

The storyline behind Dominion is the usual Team A hates Team B and thus must out-resource the other in a quest for total planetary/universal domination. A bunch of power plants get built, units and structures get built and upgraded, and eventually one side gets tired and rolls over. I’m sure that the people who worked hard on the storyline for Dominion and on the pre-game trailer and on the cut-scene (yes, that’s scene singular, as in the same cut-scene you see before every mission no matter how you’re doing) will be gnashing their teeth over such a dismissal of their efforts, but c’mon people! How many futuristic cookie-cutter RTS games are you going to spit out before somebody tries something novel?

And that’s actually the main dig against Dominion —it’s just so generic. It plays decently, it has nice graphics, it isn’t buggy or brainless, but you could put it in a box marked "Dark Colony" or "Earth 2140" or "Extreme Tactics" or any one of the other host of so-so RTS games out right now and you wouldn’t know the difference.

Me, I’m waiting for Dune 2000 (at least we’ll have a good sci-fi world as the backdrop) and Force Commander (see Dune 2000 above). Plus, with Westwood and LucasArts behind 'em, maybe they’ll have a new spurt of creative energy, because a whole lot of the current crop sure don’t have what it takes.

Bottom Line

On the Mech front, you have the good, the bad, and the downright ugly and unfinished. My money’s on MechCommander for a couple of reasons—a good supporting game universe and a decent enough balance of frustration and payoff to keep me coming back for more, plus it will hopefully bring back into the fold some of the die-hard board gamers out there who’ve been waiting for a decent computerized version of the FASA game.

Dominion will get a turn or two more in the old CD drive before being retired, if nothing else just to look at those Imperial walkers and keep me fired up for Force Commander. And Cyberstorm 2, well, while long since being mercifully removed from my hard disk, it’s at least still proving useful (except my glass of iced tea keeps getting stuck to the CD).