Dark Oberon 15.5Mb
Dark Oberon is an open source real time strategy game of the same genre as Warcraft II. It gets a quite good rating, development having stopped though a few years ago. It’s basically a multiplayer game as there’s no AI for enemies. It can be played single player as a resource and units development game but in this case without enemies, unless you play as both sides!
The game can be played via sharing IP addresses across the Internet, or over a LAN using computer names. It allows players to work co-operatively as well against eg another ‘team’ if they so wish, as you choose who to attack. Or several players can of course all play against all the other players, each player having several different enemies to deal with!
What makes Dark Oberon special is the visual style. The games graphics are interesting and unique, many textures and all of the game objects and people having been created from Plasticine models! This gives the game a distinctive and innovative appearance in a charming medieval setting, excellently displayed with superb graphics and animations. There is also quiet soothing music which adds to the general dreamlike/fairytalish atmosphere, together with funny and original voice-overs.
The game itself is very much a standard if not over-elaborate RTS game.
There’s a minimap panel giving a game overview, and a buildings, resources, units and action panel. Controlling actions is very easy, select with left click then right click where on the map to send the individual or unit, eg left click on a peasant, right click on a gold mine and he will go there. Attacking is similarly very easy, just select the unit or units you wish to send, then right click on who or what they are to attack.
You can store and recall up to 9 different selections, which can save time in deploying units.
You start off with a workforce of four peasants and it’s up to you to develop townships and grow your army/mini-empire while vying/parrying with your opponents!
It is important to attack some buildings as some of these building generate more units, eg footmen, peasants and molemen (miners).
All of the buildings, mines and forests can be destroyed - though forests do not regenerate if destroyed. They do however re-grow after all the wood has been collected. Talking about resources, Forests provide Wood, Mines yield Gold, and Underground Mines yield Coal. Peasants can't mine Coal; that's up to Molemen. You'll need to expand your Town Hall to be able to make Molemen.
Should you wish to remove any of your buildings, you simply attack them!
There are a total of five different buildings that can be fashioned. These are: barracks, town hall, defense tower, farm and factory. There are only two combat units, foot soldiers and catapults. There is also a blimp to transport soldiers! You can keep building as long as you can afford to, and be able to afford/ have the resources for the building(s) concerned. But you do need to have removed any enemy units or buildings or to have cleared some forest in order to be able to build if there’s no free land at hand. You can allocate as many peasants/units as you wish to building or gathering resources. As there’s no crop management to worry about, it does let you concentrate on allocating workers, choosing what and where to build, watching enemy movements and positioning and deploying your units; so it’s a little easier to manage than some RTS games and success depends more on your skill in attack and defense, without having to worry about feeding your work and armed forces, although you still need enough farms to produce food! Coal from mines is used to provide energy.
It does have shortcomings, especially in regard to single player mode, but remember it is free and open-source! On the good side, it features a very easy to use ingame menu making it all round easy to navigate and play. Multiplayer works well, apart from lack of campaign modes and limited maps to play.
It’s a fun and fast to play game, though it lacks campaigns as such and only has two maps It is however possible to create your own maps with the built in editor. Combat itself is simplistic, but can still lead to terrific gameplay, and some will prefer not having to micromanage many aspects of the game! It’s certainly much easier to get into than most RTS games and has a substantially lower learning curve as a result.
It is available for Windows and Linux, but does need an Open GL graphics card and a modestly (1GHz) fast PC.
Do you hearken back for the days when RTS games were relatively simple? Dark Oberon can fulfil that wish!
If you like the cartoony style graphics and faster gameplay style, you might wish to get some friends together and give this a try!
Nice game, cool graphics!
Download HERE
Quick Guide HERE (Read this first before starting the game)
