Dark Colony Demo

In order for an RTS to be successful and enjoyed by people many years after its release, the game needs to maintain a high replayability factor, otherwise the matches get repetitive and boring. While titles like Starcraft and Command & Conquer managed to hit the sweet spot when it comes to unit balancing and replayability, many others failed to do the same and dissipated into obscurity since then.

Dark Colony is part of the latter category, although it did have some interesting ideas at the time and it certainly looked nice enough. However, it also came with a large number of flaws that prevented it from becoming too popular, most of which were related to the gameplay and the fact that the units were not very diverse and the mechanics lacked the proper ingredients to captivate the players.

The plot itself is not very bad and it certainly sounds somewhat plausible, at least if you ignore a few obvious discrepancies along the way. Hence, it all revolves around the fact that humans are on their way to colonize Mars, in order to escape from the already dying Earth. However, another race of aliens are already trying to do that, which spawns a bloody conflict between the two factions, with Mars being the prize.

One of the major mistakes of the game is the fact that there is not much of a difference when it comes to the actual units, since they are more or less the same, only with different names and appearances. While this is great for maintaining the balance between the factions, it is also annoying and it limits the amount of tactics you can employ on the battlefield.

However, the two races react differently when it comes to the day/night cycle, since the aliens are better suited for fighting at night, while the humans obviously prefer the light of day. You can stumble into artifacts along the way, which can spice up the gameplay from time to time and provide one side with a minor advantage of the opponent. They are not incredibly powerful, though, nor do they affect the gameplay too much.

In the end, Dark Colony can be fun for a short while, but the repetitive mechanics quickly ruin the illusion and saturate your need for this type of RTS. Hence, you can certainly enjoy the interesting campaign and maybe a few skirmishes, but the appeal quickly disappears after that.