PC Game Preview: No Man's Land
Michael Eckenfels explores this new historical strategy title set during the days of American explorers and Native Americans.
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Introduction
Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In other words, if you don't learn from your mistakes, you'll get a sizeable portion of your hindquarters forcibly removed by a closing mandible. As ubiquitous as peasant-pushing games are these days, it really takes a unique angle and/or basis to make something stand out. Even then, such a game will still suffer the slings and arrows of comparison to Age of Empires or any other explore/ expand/exploit/exterminate games of note.
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Shelling a Spanish barracks. |
I had a chance to preview CDV's promising-looking title, No Man's Land, and have been looking forward to it. I had an opportunity to see it at E3, where my colleague Greg Borisko did a fine preview. Being a major history nut in general (wargames are a direct offshoot of this mania of mine), the game's basis in the colonial era of North American history was one of those "yeah, why didn't someone else think of that" ideas. After reading through the standard advertising publication that details the game, it was apparent to me that CDV's title, while niche-based and probably only appealing to history aficionados, would be a hit.
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Graphics are impressive. Here, the English build a Barracks. |
An English warship trades shots with the Spanish. |
The build I received, though, is not a clear indicator of the game's strengths as detailed in CDV's literature. Interesting points such as a game where one side plays settlers trying to build a railroad across a map, while Indians do their utmost to prevent it, are sadly missing. The single-player random map games are not quite working in this build either (when I get a game started, the camera centers on the 'Town Center' with the handful of 'peasants' around it, and then the message 'Congratulations! You Won!' appears immediately after and the game ends). The only thing that is working are the three campaigns-Wood Indian, Spanish, and English-and all three are deep, interesting, and pose several challenges.
System Requirements
My poor Pentium III/500 MHz system barely held No Man's Land significant requirements (recommended: 1.2 GHz) in check. After toning down the graphics settings I still had problems with it running smoothly, regardless of the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128MB graphics card I have installed. Nevertheless, this is just an indicator that slower/older machines will have problems digesting the raw input this game kicks out.
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