New World Computing's Chaos Overlord (designed by Stick Man Games) is a new abstract strategy game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Your place is that of a kingpin or warlord, and your goal is to carve out your territory in the city. The city itself is displayed as an 8x8 grid, and you buy and move pieces, called gangs. In some strange way, the game feels like Chess meets Cyberpunk!
You start the game with one unit and one sector. Your units (hereafter known as gangs) can move one square at a time, and you can hire one new gang each turn. At any time a gang can attempt to bring the sector it occupies under your control. Controlled sectors pay you a tax each turn (and in some scenarios, control of a certain number of sectors is a victory condition).
Each gang has a list of stats, including combat abilities, and slightly less militant things like a research rating, or an influence rating. Each of these abilities applies to different aspects of the game. Likewise, each sector has a set of stats, covering how much tax it pays when controlled, how easy it is to get control of, and how much chaos (more on this in a minute) it will tolerate. Heck, even weapons have stats, covering tech level, amount of damage done, etc.
Within each sector are three districts, and yep, you guessed it - each district has a set of stats! Each district grants various bonuses or penalties, once they've come under your influence. For instance, an apartment complex enhances the amount of taxes you collect from that sector. A research center reduces taxes, but adds to a unit's ability to research new items while in that sector.
Chaos Overlords is turn-based, and each turn consists of possibly hiring a gang, or firing any number of them, and issuing orders to the other gangs. Each gang can accomplish one task per turn, be it moving to another sector, attempting to gain control of a sector, attempting to influence a district, researching an item, attacking an opponent, etc. There is also the option to chaos a sector. What this means is that your gang will go into the sector and shake down the residents for some extra cash (you _never_ have enough cash in this game). Shake 'em down too often, though, and they'll get the cops to come in and bounce you out of there.
When you need more gangs, you can hire them, money providing. At any given moment there are three gangs up for potential hire. If you hire one of them, on the next turn the slot they occupied will fill up with another random gang. If you just hate your choices, you can, in lieu of hiring, dismiss one of the three waiting gangs. A new gang will show up in that slot in your the next turn. Gangs cover a wide variety of costs and abilities, so hiring can get tricky when you really need a new gang, but can't afford any of the ones that are available. What do you do? Which one do you dismiss? On the other hand, sometimes you'll need a powerful gang and have enough cash to be able to afford one, but the three gangs offered will all be punks and pukes (hey, these are Stick Man's terms, not ours)!
Combat in the game is very abstract. A gang can attack any other gang in the same sector. Once you issue the attack order, you just sit back and watch. An animated window of the battle pops up. You can turn these off if you like, but the designers have hit the perfect combination of amounts of info, visual interest, and time taken by these animations to keep them fresh and interesting.
That's really all there is to the game. Hiring gangs, taking control of sectors and districts, researching new weapons and items, and spreading out over the city. But that's enough. The game plays quickly, there is a lot of humor (our favorite? The gang called "the Press Corps" which is described as something like 'the most vile creature known to mankind.' û we paraphrase, but being familiar with the species, we feel its pretty accurate!) in both gang and item descriptions. Want to increase a gang's influence rating? Buy them "Cool Hats." No, we're not making this up!
Also, the interface is as smooth as you could ask for. There are several ways to perform most actions, so if drag-and-drop is your thing, that's how you can play. If you're more comfortable with drop-down menus, you can do things that way, too. While not terribly flashy, the game is quite nice-looking, especially in the 16-bit color mode. The accompanying soundtrack is not intrusive but seems to reflect the mood of the game well.
In addition to playing against the computer, you can set up a network game and have at it with your friends. This seems like the perfect type of game for network play. It is easy enough that you can start to play without looking at the manual, each turn passes fairly quickly, and a whole game can be played in an hour or two if you choose the right scenario (there are also big long epic scenarios for those late-night solo sessions).
Even in this beta state, the game seems solid and reliable, and the AI puts up a darned good fight. It took us, the IE gaming immortals, several attempts before we could win the first, presumably easiest scenario. And this was at a moderate difficulty level. We're looking forward to getting our sweaty little mitts on the final version, and when we do, be sure we'll report back with a full-blown review.
