No Man’s Land – PC – Review

The New World is the setting for No Man’s Land, a real-time strategy game from CDV Software and Related Designs. Encompassing roughly the years from 1600-1900, this game focuses on six cultures, the Woodland Native Americans, the Prairie Native Americans, the English, the Patriots, the Settlers and the Spanish.

Although the setting is historical, the history portrayed is more like a Hollywood treatment than strictly historical, which is strange for a strategy game of this type, which usually sticks pretty close to the facts. The designers have taken a few liberties, but aside from a few “huh?” thoughts at times, it doesn’t affect the overall gameplay.

There are three campaigns which can be played in any order, but for the sake of the chronological story, it’s best to begin with the first and go from there. The campaigns are, in order, Spanish, Native American and English. The Spanish campaign begins circa 1600 and deals with their first settlements and subsequent encounters with Native Americans, and also their running conflicts with the English over the New Territories. The Native Americans campaign treats their encounters with both the English and the Spanish, from the Navajo and Woodland peoples’ perspectives, and the English takes players through the years of settlement by relating the adventures of one immigrant family.

Each of the campaigns in the single-player mode features a series of missions, which all have a set of goals to reach for victory. These goals consist mainly of reconnaissance forays into enemy camps, building up settlements, naval expeditions or a combination of all three elements. These missions also feature “heroes”, which if killed, automatically mean the mission is lost. While the units differ in slight details from culture to culture, the basic traits are the same: simple bashing, hand-to-hand combat units, simple range units, more complex range units, mounted units, worker units, units which combine range and infantry skills, and elite fighting units which often have magical powers.

Each of these units is produced by specific buildings, which are built by the workers. Upgrades can be purchased for various enhancements, which mostly have to do with defensive and offensive improvements. All these buildings, units and upgrades cost resources, which consist of gold, food and wood, and are produced by buildings manned by workers.

The missions are fairly short, which keeps the game moving along briskly. The basic strategy consists of trying to keep as large an army alive as possible to the end battle, which is easy enough in the settlement-based missions, but a bit more tricky in the search-and-destroy missions. With no base to replenish units, it’s imperative to try to keep as many as possible alive on the trip, as having little or no supporting units will usually mean death for the heroes at the end of the mission. These guys are pretty rugged, but even they have their limitations.

The interface is set-up for easy access to troop commands, like grouping and actions, defensive and offensive, but actually getting them to execute these commands is at times difficult, especially when the huge army is milling about and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes the troops will ignore commands if set in aggressive mode in the Offense, and if players just leave them alone, their actions are at times inexplicable, such as when they insist on suicide missions of three units against heavily manned forts. Also, the range units will often ignore enemies who are attacking them directly, and continue shooting at distant targets. This isn’t a big problem with smaller armies, as player can assign commands easily to either groups or individual units, but with large armies, it’s much harder to keep track of everyone, which will probably result in many players just letting the combat hand play itself on out.

But, even if the entire army is lost, as long as the hero units are still alive, missions with settlement bases can send the heroes back home to retrench and replenish the army. A word of caution, though, this can only be done a finite number of times, as resources to purchase units are limited for each campaign.

The naval missions are probably the easiest to control and win, as the ships are units in themselves, and don’t feature masses of little dudes cluttering up the screen. Players need to try to focus attention on the enemies’ ports as well as general fighting, as destroying these prevents the enemies from repairing their ships.

The interface is intuitive and easy to manage, with a good mix of basic and more complex commands, which won’t overwhelm those new to real-time strategy games. However, more menu choices would help streamline play a little. Players can’t “click through” the intros to the missions, which is annoying when repeating an unsuccessful mission. While there is a “destroy building” button, there isn’t an “undo” button, which would have been nice for building settlement purposes. Other menu items which I found myself wishing for were informational pop-up menus for the fighting units’ buildings, to let me know how many units I had for each group, and other unit information.

The difficulty levels range from easy, normal and difficult, which again makes this game accessible to all skill levels. Even on the difficult level, the missions for the most part aren’t too horribly difficult, but can mostly be completed after just a few lost missions. The save game function works extremely well, with both an auto-save and manual feature, and the missions can be restarted easily.

Multiplayer has a few bonus additions to the basic campaign elements, the best of which is the ability to send some major mojo on enemy units, like the plague and termites. A special bounty hunter unit can also be purchased to go after individual targets in the multiplayer mode.

Visually, the game looks very nice, with a bit more attention paid to the backgrounds and buildings, than to the individual units, which don’t have quite as much detail as compared to other games. The snow looks especially cool, and I loved the way the oceans were drawn, with lapping waves, sharks and schools of fish swimming about.

The music is adequately thrilling, with different tunes for times of danger and peace. The sound effects are basic, and don’t offer much in the way of ambiance or mood.

This game offers a little something for everyone, with its difficulty levels, forgiving mission replays and accessible menus making it a game for beginners, plus more complex units, the necessity of strategic thinking in planning forays and battles, and the task of keeping the heroes alive until the end, all of which gives it an attraction for more experienced players. The history, even though not strictly accurate, makes it all more interesting.

However, the missions all are pretty much the same, and after playing about ten or so, the gameplay may begin to pall on players. There just isn’t enough to do to keep busy besides making lots of units and send them out on forays, as the resource gathering is almost wholly automatic, and the building is limited as to need. There is more of a focus on combat, which again seems pretty much the same from campaign to campaign. My personal tastes run to less combat and more resource management, but I know that many feel just the opposite, so this game may fit their bill exactly.