Dominion: Storm over Gift3

Rating: 1.5/5

Everyone loves real time strategy. Well, not everyone - your mum probably doesn't, but enough people do to make it the second most popular type of PC game (after Quake-y first person shoot 'em ups).

It's not surprising then that dozens of new RTS titles pop up every year. There are many ways that a new game can stand out from the crowd. It can offer loads of units and splendid graphics like Total Annihilation, for example. Or like LucasArts' forthcoming Force Commander it can offer you the chance to fight with units and characters you really care about.

And now, along comes Eidos' latest - Dominion: Storm Over Gift3 - which offers… er… none of those things. Not only does it lack any significant new ideas - it fails even to keep up with the ideas that others have introduced in the last few years.

In Dominion, four races are fighting it out over a planet - the Darken (sneaky and defensive) the Merc (heavy offensive weapons), the Scorp (cheap units) and the humans who (as usual) fall right in the middle. There's a rudimentary story line to go alongside all this and a free comic book for a little extra excitement, but it's pretty irrelevant to the game play, which is just one mission after another.

Frustration hits you from the start. Unless you are playing multi-player there is no "skirmish mode" to let you take on the opponent of your choice with all of the weapons at your disposal. Instead, you have a choice of four campaign games - one for each race. There is no game editor, either. As a result you will have to play for hours through some rather un-imaginative scenarios before you get to play with all the best units.

Mind you, the game doesn't offer much variety in units anyway. There are foot soldiers, an "engineer" unit (which can disable a foe's base if it gets close enough) a selection of tanks with legs and tanks without, a mobile "teleporter" - handy for surprise attacks - and two "hover" units - think helicopter transport and gunship. There are no ships of any kind, no significant aerial combat, no minefields and only one kind of "special attack" unit for each race. That special unit aside, (and only the Scorps' "digger" is at all interesting) the units for each race look different and cost different amounts to build but are basically the same.

Trying to decide what units to buy or buildings to build is not easy. The manual is absurdly sketchy - it's 86 pages long, but it fits inside the CD case and half of it is taken up with descriptions of the different units available. There's no list of keyboard shortcuts, no ready reference chart to explain the relative strengths of your units, no index, and little explanation of how to use tools like rendezvous points.

Once you build and start to move around you discover that the game resembles Command and Conquer in some unexpected and annoying ways. Once you have explored a section of the planet's surface, you can always see what is there even if you have no units around. You can only build one combat unit type at a time. Your weapons are designed to carve up heavily-armoured vehicles but can't seem to get rid of trees which are blocking your path. You can't finish several scenarios without exploring the entire map to find and wipe out every last enemy unit. Worst of all, the artificial intelligence is, to coin a phrase, crap.

In most scenarios, enemy units simply stand around waiting for you to get close enough and "wake them up", and they don't seem to form up into combined arms teams or anything - the computer mostly just marches towards your base with whatever units are around at the time.

The AI for your own units is just as bad. If a unit is not being fired at itself and has not been told to guard its neighbors it will frequently stand by while nearby units are chewed up. If the shortest route to where your units want to go should be right between a couple of the enemy's Colossus tanks, your units will stroll to their deaths with a happy tune on their lips.

I wouldn't want you to get the idea that Dominion is entirely without merit. It allows you to play at a choice of four resolutions up to 1280 by 1024 if your video card is up for it, for example - something any strategy game should allow. The units, buildings and explosions are often quite pretty. And the way bases are built is quite clever - you can spread buildings across a wide area as long as you have "umbical" structures between them, and energy walls are built instantly between any two "energy beacons", however far apart, which makes it possible to build defences across large parts of the map.

Some 60 maps are apparently available for the usual assortment of multi-player options but since I strongly doubt this will be a runaway gaming success I'd be surprised if you found anyone to play this with unless you bought it for them as a present.

No game is entirely without merit, but this comes as close as I've seen in a long time. And the comic book that comes with it is pretty terrible too.