Reunion Review

PRODUCT NAME

Reunion


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

Civilization and empire building game set in space.


RELEASED BY

Grandslam


COPY PROTECTION

Manual

Hard Drive Installable


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

Amiga 4000/40 w/wb3.0

2 MB chip / 12 MB fast

Seagate 130 MB HD, Conner 320 MB HD

AIR 880k external drive


REVIEW

                           In the Beginning...

    I love space sagas.  Not that politically-correct garbage like the new
 Star Trek shows, where we've managed to solve all our problems with peace
 and love and old-fashioned American capitalism.  I love the stories of 
 vast empires, of cataclysmic battles, and of great leaders.  I love Star
 Wars and Gundam.  That's how Reunion caught my eye.  It promised to go 
 beyond simple military conflict (a la Wing Commander), and deal with 
 exploration, trade, colonization, and an important long-term goal.  It 
 looked fantastic.  I had no doubt in my mind that it would be a fantastic 
 adventure in interstellar space.
 
    Here's the story.  Earth was experiencing a period of great peace.  The
 United Nations had successfully quelled all war, and as the world turned 
 to peace, people looked upward.  (At this point it starts to sound like 
 ST:TNG or SeaQuest bullshit.... It gets better, read on.)  Humanity's next
 step was obviously to the stars.  Exploration vessels were sent out to map
 the cosmos and find other worlds on which humanity might live.  Finally,
 two suitable planets were discovered, and two great colony ships were sent
 forth to claim them.  One ship disappeared mysteriously and was presumed 
 lost.  The other ship encountered an errant field of asteroids and was 
 severely damaged.  The occupants escaped to the surface of their new home,
 without the advanced technology which lay on board the ship.  Earth, 
 unfortunately, was in no position to help.  In the meantime, you see, 
 people there became strangely hostile, and many wars ravaged the planet.  
 Oops.
 
    All of this happened centuries ago.  New Earth has crawled back from 
 the primitive level which was forced upon it, and a great civilization has
 sprung forth.  You are, of course, the dictator of New Earth, and it's 
 your job to find out what the heck happened to the old one.  Not a small 
 task.
 
                             At First Sight
                             

    The game starts showing you standing over a holographic projection
 table.  This is your command room, and it is from here that you issue your
 orders to the forces of New Earth.  A row of buttons on top and a set of 
 "hot zones" on the screen allow you to access the other menus and displays
 through which you control your civilization.  Initially you are alone, but
 in order to get anything accomplished you need to hire a set of advisors: 
 a builder, a pilot, a warrior, and a scientist. You can choose from three
 different candidates for each position, a cheap and unskilled one, one
 with moderate skills and cost, and an expensive but powerful one.  These  
 advisors don't really offer much advice, but are needed in order to build 
 structures, conduct research, pilot ships, and fight wars.  Once you have 
 procured them they will huddle about you, looking like the generals in 
 Powermonger.
 
    Here's my first quip, your advisors are stupid. Very stupid.  You can
 send them to the university, and they still come back stupid.  This 
 becomes apparent when you have a conversation with them.  These 
 "conversations" take place through a menu system of possible questions and
 commands.  Most of them are useless.  For example, if you ask them how 
 they are they will either tell you that they have everything that they 
 need, or they complain that they want more money.  There is NO WAY to give
 them more money!  Once you've paid their price they become your permanent
 slaves, no salary is needed, or possible for that matter.  The only cost  
 they incur is when you pay their tuition when you send them to the 
 university.  You can also ask them what you should do next.  They NEVER 
 EVER give ANY useful information.  They only tell you to research stuff 
 that you haven't already (duh), or they tell you everything's fine.  The 
 whole conversation aspect of the game is pointless and wasted.
 
    If you feel the need to relax, there's a pub next door.  You won't be
 doing much there.  The few people there you can talk to have very little 
 to say, and will sometimes repeat the same thing until the end of the 
 game.  After a while a spy will show up, whom you can hire to give you 
 information on other races' colonies and fortifications.  A pirate shows 
 up later, and you can send him on a few preset missions for small amounts 
 of ore or weapons.  At one point in the game the bar becomes incredibly 
 useful, allowing you to halt hostilities with an entire race of aliens.
 Unfortunately the place is so damn boring you probably won't go there 
 often enough to notice.

                      Where Does the Fire Station Go?


    The first display you'll probably access is the land display.  This is 
 a Sim City-esque view of your colony, showing rivers, trees, sand dunes, 
 etc., as well as your buildings.  You need to erect structures to give 
 your colonies various abilities, and your citizens will periodically 
 demand public works (We demand a stadium! Sound familiar?). Basic needs 
 such as food or shelter must be supplied.  Mines must be built to supply 
 the raw materials needed to build spacecraft and weapons.  New Earth's 
 settlement comes well supplied with basic facilities, but will need 
 upgrading periodically to cope with your expanding population.  New 
 colonies must be built from scratch.
 
    Once again, you are hit with a sense of pointlessness (just like the
 C= buyout! -Josh).  It doesn't matter WHERE you build your buildings, 
 it never effects how your colony functions.  The map only serves to 
 limit the number of buildings you can have, which becomes really
 aggravating when you're forced to fit buildings in like a jigsaw puzzle.  
 This is supposed to be the surface of a PLANET for crissakes!  What kind 
 of planet has only 25 square kilometers of surface area???  You should be 
 able to build ROADS and BRIDGES and CITIES!  Unfortunately Reunion's 
 surface display is little more than a fancy means of limiting your
 colonies to ridiculously small levels. 

                            Subliminal Learning?


    Once you've built New Earth up enough to support space exploration, you
 need to research the technology for it.  This is done by listening to 
 compact discs.  I am not kidding.  Research consists of going to the 
 research screen, pushing a CD into a player, and watching a nifty 
 frequency analyzer display.  If only real research were like this.  After 
 listening to the CD, a vector display of what you just researched pops up 
 on your holographic projector (this is its only use).  This looks cool but
 does not really add much to the game.
 
    The annoying thing about Reunion's R&D system is that you CANNOT
 research new technologies until the computer decides you can.  Many
 technologies can't even be developed by you, but must be obtained 
 elsewhere.  Sorry, if I can develop spacecraft on my own I DAMN WELL can 
 develop something as primitive as a tank!

                         Keep Our Jobs at Home!


    Now we hop over to the building screen, where you can see the same 
 nifty vector graphic as well as a bitmapped image of the product.  
 Building stuff is simply a matter of clicking on a purchase button and 
 selecting how many you want.  The amount you can build is limited by the 
 amount of money (from taxing you citizens) and raw materials you have. 
 Sometimes a support system must be built for you to build the item.  A 
 space station, for instance, must be built before you can build a cruiser,
 and each station can build only one cruiser at a time.  It takes time to 
 build each item, so don't expect stuff to just appear.
 
    It is here that you hit one of the stupidest oversights in the game. 
 You can build things only  on New Earth.  No matter how advanced your 
 colonies are, even if they have a HIGHER level of technology than your 
 home world, they can't construct so much as a miner droid!  They just 
 can't!  This means that in order to build a defense force for other 
 colonies YOU HAVE TO BUILD IT AT HOME AND THEN SHIP IT ALL OVER!  This is 
 too much of a pain in the ass.  I just left my colonies undefended.

                          Mapping the Armada


    So, we've built our spaceships; now let's sally forth into the cosmos!
 You first must organize your ships together into groups.  You can access a
 screen which displays all of your groups together, from which you can 
 select the individual group you want to work with.  There are four kinds 
 of groups that you can create - Satellite, Cargo, Combat and Defense. 
 Once you've created the necessary type of group you can add your ships to
 it.  
 
    Reunion gives you a limited number of groups, spread over two pages. 
 One page is dedicated to planetary defense forces, while the other is for 
 all other groups.  As I mentioned before, building defense forces requires
 a LOT of work and patience.  They don't even appear to be required 
 (discussed below).  Yet Reunion makes 50% of the available group slots 
 DEDICATED to defense forces!  You can't put anything else in them!  No one
 would possibly EVER need that many groups of them!  Furthermore, there is 
 apparently NO WAY to disband a group once it's been created.  If all the 
 ships are removed or destroyed, the "group" is sent back to New Earth.  
 The name of the group (which you can't change) sits empty in the slot it
 occupies.  You can't get rid of it.  Fortunately,  Reunion gives you 
 plenty of slots to work with; I didn't even use half of them.  It's still 
 annoying to leave all those empty groups sitting around.
 
    Having grouped your ships together, it's time to hop in the cockpit!
 This gives you a view of the stars, if you're in space, or of the planet
 you're on when you've landed.  It's pretty. It's useless. I would never 
 ever use this screen were it not for the fact that it's the only place 
 where you can command your ships to take off or land.  Every other order 
 can be issued from the starmap.
 
    The starmap is a pretty display of the star system or planetary system
 that you've currently selected.  It looks really similar to the map 
 display in the multistage Psygnosis shoot-em-up Awesome.  At its main 
 level it shows an entire star system, with all known planets shown.  Other
 known star systems can be selected from a menu on the right.  Clicking on 
 a planet zooms in to show the planet, any known moons, and any known 
 fleets of spacecraft in the system.  Most functions concerning ships, such
 as moving them, combat, etc. can be accessed from the menu here.  This is 
 also the only way to access a planetary view of another planet.  If you 
 hit the button in the command center you get only New Earth, nothing else.
 The starmap is probably the most polished of Reunion's features.  It works
 well and allows most functions needed during the game to be executed.  
 It's no more complex than any of the other displays, but this type of 
 display calls for simplicity rather than complexity.
 
    Sending out your ships once they are built is relatively painless.
 Launch them from the cockpit, then tell them where to go.  If you watch
 from the cockpit you can see a nifty starfield.  Once you've reached
 another world you can drop satellites to explore and determine the mineral
 content and inhabitability of the world.  Mineral worlds can have robotic
 mining stations installed, while habitable planets can have new colonies
 erected.  It's even possible to build a mining station before the
 inhabitability report comes in, and then build the colony later.
 
    True to form, Reunion just doesn't go deep enough here.  Mining 
 stations are next to worthless as they can't be upgraded and can store 
 only a tiny amount of ore.  I soon abandoned them in favor of constructing
 colonies, which can still have mines as well as storage centers to hold
 the ore.  While it's possible to make use of the added output of the
 mining stations, it requires a massive effort to collect the ore.  Ship
 after ship must be sent in to pick up the small amount generated because
 if the stores get full, production stops.  It's too much work.

                               Not Alone


    Not long after your first ship is sent out, you'll encounter your first
 alien race. They live within your OWN STAR SYSTEM.  For some reason you
 haven't detected them until now.  Oh, well.  Anyway, they're a nice 
 folk.  They give you all sorts of interesting technology that you wouldn't
 be able to get otherwise.  Your meetings with them take place in a small 
 room where you can ask and answer questions.  This is the only interaction
 (aside from the bar) that you can have with aliens.  The only trade in the
 game is available here.  You can't even contact the aliens, they have to 
 contact you.  If you wanna talk, tough beans.  You can even send a ship 
 laden with useful ore and equipment to an alien world and LAND on it, but 
 to no avail.  You can't trade and they won't even talk to you.  You can 
 even land on a HOSTILE planet, no attempt being made to attack your 
 juicy, undefended cargo ship.
 
    They will, however, destroy your satellites.  Even if the race is
 friendly, normal satellites will be destroyed when deployed.  Only spy
 satellites and spy ships can be deployed over alien worlds.  Not that 
 they're very useful, mind you.  When you drop a satellite over a 
 supposedly densely populated alien world, the images that come back are of
 a BARREN SURFACE!  NO BUILDINGS OR ACTIVITY!  I guess all aliens must live
 underground or something.

                              Just Fight, OK?


    Not all aliens want to be your friends, and of course the only real way
 to deal with them is by blowing the crap out of 'em.  For that you need a
 navy, an army, and weapons to arm the two.  How you group them depends on
 whether the force is to be offensive or defensive.  I got through the game
 with only one defensive force, stationed at New Earth.  The aliens either
 didn't know or didn't care about my fat, juicy, undefended colonies just
 waiting to be invaded. All of their assault attempts were on New Earth.
 Aliens are dumb. 
 
    Therefore you'll probably be building only offensive forces.  These are
 similar to your peacetime groups, except they have slots for both warships
 and ground forces.  The ships are to take out opposing navies and the 
 tanks and jets are for mopping up on the surface. Naturally you have to 
 take out the enemy spacecraft first. (It should be mentioned that you can 
 actually land on enemy planets with a full complement of tanks, troop 
 carriers, jets and warships, without the enemy so much as throwing a 
 pebble at you...Aliens won't fire first around their own planets.) 
 
    Space combat is simple, noninteractive, but cool.  It's probably the
 prettiest part of the game.  After you give the order to attack, a radar
 display showing your ships and the enemy's ships pops up, and the battle
 ensues.  This is kind of like watching the space battles in Macross or 
 Gundam from far away, with little specs of light exchanging little 
 blossoms of fire.  In the lower right corner of the screen a series of 
 animations plays during the battle.  These are reminiscent of the final 
 battle in Return of the Jedi, and look real cool.  They don't actually 
 MEAN anything, mind you, they're just eye candy.  Only the radar gives 
 meaningful information.  It would be nice to be able to issue orders and 
 strategies during the battle, but the only option you have is to retreat. 
 I usually didn't; the animations are so cool that I didn't care if I lost,
 I just watched them until the end.  All in all, the whole affair basically
 amounts to sending out your boys and telling them to "wing it."
 
    Ground Combat is different. Before combat begins you are asked to
 organize you troops into divisions, deciding between concentrated strength
 and firepower or greater flexibility in movement. Combat takes place on a
 single screen of terrain, where you can issue orders to individual 
 divsions.  It all happens so fast that you can't really do much but tell 
 them to go ahead and shoot, and it doesn't pay to have lots of them 
 because you could never issue orders to them all.  Once all the 
 defenders are taken out the planet's yours.... And you get a colony there 
 whether you want it or not.  Invading is real expensive, not because of 
 the cost of warfare, but because you're required to build a whole damn new
 colony every time you win.

                               Summing Up

    I really wanted to like Reunion.  Honest.  It's very pretty, even on
 the ECS version, the music is fantastic (you have two user-selectable
tunes
 to choose from), and the whole concept of a civilization attempting to 
 discover what became of its progenitors is absolutely fantastic.  
 Unfortunately, its flaws are much to great for me to recommend that
 someone plunk down money for it.
 
    For one thing, it's way too linear.  You can't do ANYTHING out of the
 proscribed order.  You discover each star system in a certain order, go to
 war in a certain order, and are at the mercy of events which you aren't
 allowed to change even if you could.  For example, soon after you meet the
 nearby benevolent aliens, they tell you that an enemy race is coming and
 that they need your help.  They give you plans for a simple space fighter
 and ask that you send as many as you can build to help them.  You have 
 enough time to build about THREE before the aliens attack.  If you send 
 them out you're greeted by an armada of over 500 ships (far larger than 
 ANYTHING ELSE in the game!) which neatly destroys your little force, kills
 all your buddies, and generally gives you a bad time.  Once your buddies 
 are dead, the armada disappears as mysteriously as it came.  The force 
 guarding the alien HOME WORLD isn't even a fifth as big!  The whole thing 
 screams plot device.  As an experiment I cheated by editing the data files
 to give me a massive fleet, big enough to take out the alien menace.  I 
 sent it out, and after a long, protracted, battle, managed to defeat the 
 invaders.  No sooner had I done this than I was told of how the friendly 
 aliens' base was destroyed by the armada which I HAD JUST OBLITERATED!  
 This defied all logic and really pissed me off.
 
    But what really kills Reunion is that is just isn't deep enough. It
 shows wonderful potential in its colony building and exploration 
 sequences, but they just don't have enough complexity to make them 
 worthwhile.  Why offer me the ability to lay out my bases when the layout 
 makes no difference?  Why let me have defense forces when I can build only
 equipment at my home base?  Why have trading ships when I can't even 
 trade?  The whole game is an exercise in astonishment giving way to 
 dissapointment.  A lot of talent clearly went into the basic design of 
 this game, but hampered by its linearity, shallow gameplay, and incredibly
 stupid ending, I have to say that it was wasted.

                             OVERALL

 Sound: Excellent
 Graphics: Excellent
 Gameplay: Poor
 Lastability: Once you win it you'll never play it again.
 Value: Below average
 Overall: Below average