Conflict Zone Demo

Television plays an important role in everyone’s life nowadays, whether they you know it or not. Some of your thoughts and ideas might have arisen because of stuff you’ve seen on TV, although this usually involves buying a specific kind of soda or a burger. However, the media can also be used for far more gruesome purposes, including wars and propaganda against certain people, or even against ideas.

Conflict Zone is a real-time strategy game that provides you with the chance to see how would a war based on media propaganda function, by allowing you to use the concept to your advantage and work out strategies involving civilians and cameras. Thus, the idea is quite novel and interesting, as long as the developers manage to integrate it properly into the gameplay and make the experience thoroughly enjoyable.

Story-wise, it all revolves around the conflict between two sides: GHOST, a secret organization of nations that want to acquire as much wealth and resources as possible, without regard for the civilian lives lost in the process, and ICP, which is a NATO-like alliance between the countries that want to stop GHOST from achieving their plans at all costs.

Since this is an RTS, after all, the underlying mechanics are basically the same: gather resources, build a base and train an army powerful enough to assault the enemy and eliminate his base. Conflict Zone makes a radical change in the resource department, since it adds ‘popularity’ as currency and the primary means of getting support from the people back home. Hence, you can add civilian camera crews to your base and present the leaders with your victories, which in turn increases your public trust and popularity. Naturally, this provides you with better technology and more units, which is the practically the goal in strategy games.

On the other hand, these mechanics are rather poorly implemented and it can be quite difficult to make use of the resources, especially since it takes a lot of time to gather them. Moreover, you can lose popularity by being defeated in conflicts, which leaves you unable to acquisition more troops. Exciting as it may sound, the mechanics are flawed and they certainly work against the natural flow of the game, rather than make the matches more interesting.

Conflict Zone is not going to go down in history for anything, but it certainly could have, if the developers had taken a little bit more time to integrate their ideas and polish things a while longer. Instead, you are just left with a mediocre product that does not function as intended, although it is still possible to have a bit of fun with it, just to see what might have been.