Ok, let`s face it, here`s one of those many games that did not make it among the gamers. Why? I don`t know, it feels like som kind of early beta version of Starcraft! Almost everything in this game reminds me of Starcraft (wich by the way, is soon to be realized on Macintosh)... You are on Mars and is fighting som kind of aliens called "Gray"... They look like my vision of an alien when I was a kid... Large oval heads and gigant black eyes that looks nothing but silly... Well here we go...

Story and Characters
Like I said, mankind have in some way found it`s way to Mars, where it encountred an alien civilization called "Gray", wich we (like always) had to start a fight with... You command your troopers and vehicles in the combat of these "evil" aliens. When you start your mission you have nothing but a base and two marines, one of them is of higher rank than the other... At first, you build this vehicle namned "exploiter" wich places itself onto a heap gas of something called Petra-7 and starts transforming it to something you can use and will need: money! You can choose to play either the humans or the Gray, I prefer the humans (I often do, infact this whole review is based on the human part of the game)...

Graphics
Ok, at first I thought "Oh god, what is this" but after a while I starts realizing that it`s not bad. All graphics and sound reminds me in some way of Blizzards game: Starcraft! Your marines speak that "marine" language, and all your vehicles have the right futuristic style and names, but yet it is different. The landscape is nice green on the day, but changes into gray and darker when it turns into night (wich happens every 10 minutes or so...). Your unit has an indicator that (suprise!) indicates the amount of life left in the poor guy. The walker you see on the picture is an Reaper, it reminds you of the Goliath in Starcraft right? Well, nevermind the Starcraft complex, this game was released long before Starcraft, so! The graphics is not bad at all for a game released in 1997... Wait, there is more, I just have to tell you about the games explosions (wich you can´t avoid to see if you ever play the game). they are good, they blast into a mushroom-cloud and vanishes into the air like real explosions. That kinda got me of...

Music
This is one thing I like about these games, the sound of mother nature. Birds singing, and so on! It gives the game a special feeling somehow. When I turned the volume up at with my stereo connected to my Mac, I felt like I was sitting outside playing it. That`s good. The sound`s overall is pretty good. I almost want to scream when I hear the sound of my marines weapons breaking thru the sound of birds at 0600 hour! Yeah! One thing that may be a bit disturbing, is that whenever you tell your trooper to go somewhere he answer something like: "Certainly Sir!" or "Here we go". Hearing that while moving your squad through the map is not fun at all... How about shutting the (edited out of print) up and sneak upon the enemy? Else: nothing, DarkColony sure has good sound!

Game play
This is when it starts get frustrating! I never figured out how to select one tropper without making a square around him with the mouse! Selecting units at all is pretty hard in D.C. Often you think that you have nothing selected and starts building something, and whooops, all your troopers are at that locations like fly´s to a horse-shit! Frustrating. Another thing I realized was that destroying ONE enemy requires a pretty large group of soldies/vehicles. They might be aliens but find someone that can take 5 straight grenades to the head! You can? Yeah right! Sometimes, when I sit in the dark playing D.C I just can`t get enough money! The money is always a major problem in these type of games, but this one is different. I think that the "Exploiter" (that thing wich uses VESPA-7 to make riches) is lazy! Ok, it would not be fun to get all money directly and just crushing the alien punks, but a little bit more at a time would not harm anyone, especially not the player! The game itself holds a funny thing! An encyclopedia containing all data over both humans and Gray`s... All vehicles, artifacts, units, everything. I like that, and the encyclopedia itself sure got a futuristic look, check it out...

Bug Report
I found no bugs when playing D.C. It runs smothly at my machine (what does not on a G3 266Mhz?), and it does not crash or behaves funny. It just resize the screen to 640x480 and start up... Nothing strange... The game itself requires 20,5 megs of RAM at my computer! I find that very much, but I can`t find any system reqirements in any ReadMe just beacuse i could not find the ReadMe file at all :( Well...

Judgment
Too look at this sober and clean, is it the newest of it`s kind: No! Is it the best of it kind? Not today: No! Well then, how is it? My opinion is that DarkColony is a pretty good game for beeing a pre Starcraft game! Released in 1997, so it is not so old, but as they say, computers and software... Buy a computer today and it will be to slow tomorrow. That`s the deal... It`s pretty good... Thanx!