SuperPower

Are you a fan of Risk? If yes then skip forward a bit. If no, read on. The only reason you'll want to play Superpower is to take control of blighty's military stockpile and to nuke Paris. Of course it is, any self-respecting Englishman that gets his hands on a global strategy game always goes straight for the irradiated Gallic option. It’s some sort of primal instinct we have, along with battering cod and looking surprised when it rains.

You'll do it the once, go through the laboriously painstaking process of aiming each warhead at the Eiffel Tower and watching the missiles fly. There’ll be a moment of ghoulish satisfaction as they hit then you’ll probably grin and quote lines from WarGames as the rest of the world reacts in kind and the nukes start flying across the globe. But once you realise there's no fancy visual payoff, no scenes of mushroom clouds over the Seine, no charred corpses littering the Champs Elysees, you'll provide an ironic gallic shrug and never play the thing again. Because life’s too short and there are Counter-Strike sessions to win. That’s it for SuperPower. End of review. Can I go home now?

Er, The Risk Players?

Hmm? Oh, yes. The Risk fans. Right, well SuperPower is everything you ever wanted in a computerised version of the classic board game but have yet to be given by any of the officially licensed products. I got into a lot of trouble many years ago by daring to suggest that the computerised version of the Game Of Global Conquest1 M wasn’t the greatest thing since sliced butter. Long story but I was eventually proved right (as always).

Anyway, Superpower is essentially Risk on a larger, deeper scale. It isn’t supposed to be. don't get me wrong. It’s supposed to be a realistic real-time global strategy game, based on the most recent world data from US military and CIA databases. It doesn’t have any connection to, association with or desire to be linked to Risk. But that’s what it is regardless.

Bush Fires

You’re supposed to take control of any country on the planet and steer it to success. The game features a very open-ended goal structure that is mainly driven by the player’s own parameters. Want to rebuild the Soviet Empire? Go for it. Want to turn Belize into a nuclear power? Give it your best shot. Want to unite the Muslim world against the West? Well, here you can. SuperPower doesn’t really tell you what to do, as much as it just gives you a global simulator to play around with.

You’ve got all manner of resources with which to pull off your goals - economic, political, military, espionage and so on. It's all played out on a turn-by-tum basis (except for combat, which is a semi real-time affair), and while it isn’t the most graphically rewarding of games, it still manages to drag you in with the sheer weight of authenticity involved. All it’s missing is a multiplayer option, which would have turned SuperPower into the perfect computer version of Risk. But then Risk fans won’t be unfamiliiar with accusations of lonerism so maybe they won’t mind too much after all.