GameRx: Dark Colony (1997)

Hey, folks! Doc Watson here, finally starting up a column here on the site. Here in GameRx, I’m writing up prescriptions for older games for your consideration. Hopefully you’ll look into these little gems from the past of gaming and give them a spin to see if they work for you.

Today, I’m prescribing Dark Colony, a quality real-time strategy game (RTS) from 1997 made by GameTek.

Before we get started, here’s the opening cinematic of the game to set the tone.

Fair warning: the game is a bit gory, but keep in mind this is with 1997 animation technology. It’s not that bad, but just in case you’re sensitive to that.

While it shouldn’t be a problem, the base requirements to run the game are:

90 MHz Pentium processor
16 MB RAM
1 MB video memory
5 MB hard drive space

It’s the year 2137, and humans are colonizing on Mars. This is made possible by a substance called Petra-7, a refineable gas that is released through the crust of the planet. Terraforming projects have yielded considerable success, creating jungles and deserts with plant and animal life. Unfortunately for the humans, the Ta’ar, an alien collective of classic Greys and their associated allies, wishes to colonize on Mars as well, since Earth is now beyond redemption, desecrated by human activity, and they fear human involvement on Mars will cause the planet to suffer the same fate. Trying to obtain Mars for themselves before it is ruined, the Ta’ar seek to keep the planet in its more natural state and to put a halt in terraforming. Both sides engage in a war on Martian soil to determine who will colonize the planet.

I can only find screenshots form non-English copies of the game. Know Hungarian?

If more modern RTS’s like Starcraft are a bit too fast-paced or have too much focus on micro-managing, you should probably give the game a look. Units move and deal damage a bit slower than more recent RTS’s like Starcraft, giving the player opportunities to maneuver without having to worry about micromanaging each side. There’s only one resource in-game, which is generated passively by deployed gatherers. Units are built instantly, countering the slower gameplay and allowing for sudden comebacks in dire straits.

The controls are beautifully simple: click to select a unit, click to move or attack, and right-click to deselect. This will take a little practice if you’re used to the right-clicking system used in most other RTS’s like Age of Empires or Starcraft, but it shouldn’t be too hard to adjust. Unit pathfinding doesn’t have any noticeable flaws, which is certainly a relief in any RTS. Other traditional selection and command methods work as well, like shift-clicking to add individual units to a group and designating groups to number-row hotkeys.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, but it has a much different flow than modern RTS games. The most unusual game mechanic is the real-time cycling between day and night. Humans see well in the day and poorly at night, while the greys see well at night but poorly during the day. As such, it’s important to time attacks to take advantage of the other side’s weakness.

When the game starts, each player has a base node, a commander, and two foot-soldiers (humans have Troopers, the greys have…well, Greys). This starting node is the only base that the player has; all buildings will improve the node, allowing it to build different units or upgrades.

It kinda looks like this when you start as the human player. The buildings in the upper left are your HQ node, and the crater in the lower-right is an untapped Petra-7 vent

One interesting feature of the game is that both the humans and the greys are very similar statistically, differing only in complimentary plot-appropriate abilities, such as the vision differences we mentioned before. For example, Human commanders can summon dropships with reinforcements, but Grey commanders call down a saucer ship to abduct enemy units. It’s the cute little touches like this that really make the game particularly memorable.

In terms of tactics, the main trick to mastering the game is balancing your army and adapting to your opponents forces. Both sides have nine different unit classes; an extractor, a foot soldier, a melee unit, land mines, a deployable turrets, a flying scout, a siege weapon, a medical hovercraft, and an assassin. Mastery comes through knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each unit and properly balancing and coordinating these groups.

More Hungarian, this time from the game’s encyclopedia.

Diverting away from gameplay, the art direction is quite solid. The Human art style and technology has aged surprisingly well, keeping a dark gritty feel without the tone-breaking machismo of typical Space Marines. The technology all looks rugged and functional, making it surprisingly believable. In contrast, the Greys manufacture everything through genetic manipulation rather than mechanical engineering. The only actual devices any of their units have are rifles and repair units; everything else is a genetically engineered organism. All the units follow a logical philosophy of form following function, making believable (if a bit silly) creatures. Additionally, all the units on both sides are easily identifiable and are almost impossible to confuse, meaning you don’t have any of those annoying surprises where that enemy soldier you thought had a rifle actually has a flamethrower. I hate moments like those.

Also, the cutscenes are surprisingly high quality for 1997. While the palette is sometimes a bit too dark to see what’s happening on old CRT monitors, the animation is of high quality for the standards of the day and does a great job of showing what’s happening in-universe without taking control out of the player’s hands. You get some great shots of how the units you command actually fight, highlights the cultural and political differences between each side, and shows the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, showing that, as usual, there is no right answer in the war.

Suprisingly heavy stuff for an RTS back then. No one really tried this tone again until Starcraft.

In conclusion, this is a great example of an even-paced RTS with consistent theming, functioning almost perfectly on the premise of nearly absolute equality between sides. The game can be found for download with some quick googling. If you’re looking for a fan-site, I’m sad to say that the last English site shut down a few years ago. The only one I can find is in Polish at http://www.darkcolony.pl/news.php, but a quick google translate should get you the rough idea of the site. If you have any of your own questions or concerns with this prescription, be sure to leave a comment on the post or drop me a line on my Twitter, @DocWatsonMD. I hope to hear your feedback soon. Enjoy!