The focus of today’s main article is on the flash Real-Time Strategy game Star Dominion. This is the first decent real-time strategy game that wasn’t mostly tower defense in flash I’ve ever played. There have been some attempts at real-time strategy in flash before but most of what I’ve seen ended being either slight deviations from tower defense or a jumbled mess.

This is where Star Dominion stands out: it is actually executed very well. The game itself plays like Starcraft with many of the Starcraft graphics and sounds(it also takes a few graphics from Red Alert II). If your used to Starcraft, know that the old nuke silo is now a power plant(which you’ll need to build structures and units) and the Terran command center is now a refinery. The Red Alert research tower is now the central command tower(at least for the co-empire).

Technically this game is very sound with no major bugs and very fluid game-play mechanics. The resource gathering worked smoothly, the construction of buildings was flawless, and the building and battles between structures and units was smooth. The mechanics for selecting units, targeting, and firing also all worked great(which is rare for flash RTS’s).

However, there are a few things I do have to complain about. The first is the scrolling. To scroll, move your mouse to the edge of the screen and leave it there to scroll to one side. Since it is in flash, the terrain can’t follow your mouse since you’d just scroll the mouse off the screen. This is kind of annoying but it can’t be helped. However, the arrows also don’t work for scrolling, which is a disappointment as that would help greatly in commanding large battles where you have to move several units quickly while scrolling. Also, flash needs to come up with some way to make the right mouse button usable. This is not the fault of the game, but a severe flaw in flash itself. Not being able to use the right mouse button for a flash game is plain annoying as there is no way to de-select units easily without selecting something else. The third thing is that the game doesn’t give any warning that pushing the ‘menu’ button exits out of your current game without warning, thus making you lose any progress on the campaign you were just on. But besides the scrolling and the right mouse button and the quick jump to menu without any warnings, everything else is very crisp.

The game is played out between the co-empire and the Arnorians(think of them of the Empire and the rebellion, complete with a princess called ‘Arina’.) It is suggested you play the co-empire campaign first as the story flows from there. At the start of the campaign, the co-empire has discovered some resources that it needs to seize and thus needs to destroy the Arnorians in order to do so. This campaign starts with the seizure of some territories and ends with the siege of the capital city of the Arnorians. The Arnorian campaign picks up from here as the princess needs to escape from the capital city that is now being held by the co-empire. The Arnorian campaign ends with a revolution of the co-empire.

Strategy-wise this game is a lot like most RTS games. You collect your resources and then slowly expand outward and kill enemy installations, take over more resources and spread your way across the map. Be aware that enemies will harass you and they do come in large groups as you progress throughout each level. You need to establish a good perimeter defense and have one or two build-bots to repair on the fly at all times. Be sure to build the tech center before you go invade anything as your main offensive weapons will be capital ships which you must research. I found the easiest way to beat most levels was just to secure the perimeter and research the technology to build capital ships. Then build some capital ships to take out the first enemy installation. After you take over the resources there, you can start building capital cruisers. Build a fleet of these ships and hardly anything can stand in your way. Always attack with overwhelming numbers and leave nothing to chance. The last missions are always hard but eventually with decent commanding and superior firepower, you can always pull off a victory.

In conclusion, if you are a strategy fan, you’ll want to check this game out. Its missions and campaigns will be good enough to keep you occupied throughout an afternoon.

Other games worth playing:

Rapid wars

Mercenaries 2(click on picture to play) is an action/sidescroller made by Armor games and published by EA as a promotion for their XBox game Mercenaries 2: World in flames. While its pretty good for a side-scroller, it has some major flaws. For one, this game looks just like another metal slug clone with some new sprites thrown in. The background does look better drawn than metal slug games but the game-play is the same.

Some people over at Newgrounds have unfairly compared it to the real Mercenaries 2 game and by that have deemed it unworthy. While that is not fair as this game is a flash game and the real Mercenaries 2 is a huge title from Electonic arts, I would have expected better than this from Armorgames and EA. They could have at least varied the game-play at little more and added more interaction with the environment. Most flash gamers(myself included) thought the game-play was repetitive and monotonous after a while and lost interest.

The other huge complaint I have about this game is the large amount of CPU resources you need to run the game. I have never had trouble with a flash game before(besides endgame TD’s where there are a million objects on the screen) but this game lagged on all but the lowest setting. The first time I tried to play it on my dual-core computer with 2GB ram, it took forever to just get past the menu and set the settings down to low. Even at low, it chugged along at times. Since flash gamers are generally casual gamers, I’d say they did a poor job in balancing show-off graphical display(which wasn’t that great) and game-play. On anything but a high-end computer, I would recommend you turn the settings down to low to get a playable frame-rate. The game is also pretty short which is to be expected since its basically a trailer for an EA title but they could have thrown a little more into it than they did.

In the final analysis, this game would have passed if it was an amateur metal-slug game but since it was developed and published by a combination of EA and Armorgames, it was a bit of a disappointment. The length of the game, lack of creativity, and the fact that this game only had the most basic side-scrolling elements are big letdowns of what could have been a great flash game. If you’ve never played a flash side-scroller, take some time to play this game. If you’ve played metal-slug series, skip it, unless you really want to play more of the same.