The only major downside is that the units are basically the same on both human and alien sides, and there is no truly race-specific unique units that make gameplay different. They can also be awarded medals for exceptional performance in battles, and this will improve their abilities. Of course, unless you've never played an RTS game before, you'll pretty much be able to pick up everything without a problem.'ĭark Colony also introduces some new features not commonly seen in RTS, such as the ability for your units to advance in rank, similar to Fantasy General. The manual was pretty sparse and had only basic information and a minimum amount of detail. I liked some of the wars, but there are a lot of real-time strategy (RTS) games on the market that are much better suited for multiplayer play than this one. The multiplayer portion was pretty standard. The missions were fairly interesting and usually featured variations on the same theme: kill the other guy. The game was really set up to include lots of combat and little of anything else (i.e., resource management). The tutorials offered a brief but informative glimpse at the important parts of the game.

'The game was easy to get into and start playing. The game is quite easy to get into and enjoy, though, as Adrenaline Vault observes: SSI definitely took the approach 'more is better' with Dark Colony, as the game is more or less a typical RTS, except there are dozens of maps, many multiplayer options, and additional features such as nighttime missions, and the ability to fight indoors and underground. In Dark Colony, you can either represent the humans, or the aliens (called 'Greys' by the humans) and help them establish their new home and rid the planet of those pesky humans. The bad news is that a group of wandering aliens, who call themselves Taar, feel that the humans are intruding too much into their potential new home.

Humans have discovered a new, valuable energy source called Petra-7 on Mars. Still, there are some innovations, however small, that are worthy of recognition, in addition to the fact that the game is a good starting choice for newcomers to this genre who are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the frantic action of StarCraft.ĭark Colony is set on Mars in the far future. Its commercial failure is perhaps unsurprising, given the deluge of RTS games in 1997 and the fact that Dark Colony does not offer anything that is dramatically different from RTS bestsellers. Dark Colony is an underrated real-time strategy game in the same vein as StarCraft or Warcraft 2.

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