poirier@dg-rtp.dg.com (Charles Poirier) (04/10/90)
In article <6539@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> charbonn@control.crd.ge.com (Mr. Neutron) writes: > >Could someone post a review of the Amiga version of RISK. >Is it a good game?, How are the graphics?, Is it mouse oriented?, >and finally is it a challenge to beat? > >Michael R. Charbonneau Graphics are ok. The world map is good and quite faithful to the original, down to the whale and <some other cute figure I forget>. Rather than try to depict piles of armies, they just print the number; which is fine by me. Each territory gets tinted the color of its owner, which works great. The display can be scrolled continuously left and right with wraparound, and up or down to the "stops". There is also a "view only" full-world map available from a menu. Very mouse oriented. Play-wise, well, I guess it could be worse. I've played against its best skill level with 3 to 5 computer opponents and have only been beaten once out of 6 times. Others I've talked to claimed to have had more trouble beating it. I'll refrain from spoiling things by revealing its exploitable weaknesses; there are at least a couple. The computer doesn't "cheat" by having its players gang up on the human(s), which is good. In all fairness, this kind of strategy programming is hard to do well. I have yet to see a computer play really well in any game requiring both strategy and dice rolling, excepting perhaps the game of backgammon (though I've not seen a good Amiga backgammon). There are a couple of bugs, I think. I seem to remember turning in cards for which I was due bonus armies on more than one card, and only getting them for one. You are supposed to be able to turn in cards you get from killing off another player if you end up with 5 cards, but the game requires you to have six or more. In the misfeature class, they disable the menu bar while you are placing your reinforcements. So you can't review how many cards other players have; *and* you can't even see what your most recent card was, until after you place your armies (unless you had a set to turn in, then it has to let you look). Kind of slack, but I can live with it. A tip: turning off the map scroll option will make the computer's turns zip along much faster. The game has an impressive array of options for game variations and interface control, too extensive to review from memory. Someone else has reviewed the game variations already, so I won't. Recommendation: A pretty good and very complete implementation. Cheers, Charles Poirier