Genre: StrategyDeveloper: Amnesty DesignYear: 1994
Rating: 0.00 / 10.00
(based on 0 votes)
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A highly underrated game that certainly fell victim to a poor marketing effort and its own frustating design mistakes, Reunion has many features of a big strategy hit: great graphics and sounds, good gameplot, atmosphere, story twists, fairly simple "Dune II-like" management, challenge, a huge world to explore, a wide range of options in many aspects...
In a distant future (like, five hundred years from now), you're the leader of a colony that fled Earth during a rebellion that took over the planet. So far, Earth had been going through a time of peace and prosperity, but an unknown force led this rebellion to restore war and take political control. So you turned your back, got lost and found a nice site to build a new life. That happened many years ago, and you totally lost contact with the original Earth. New Earth is your home now.
By further exploring the solar system you're in, you find other places suitable for colonization, and start expanding. But there's something amiss in the air, and sometimes your technicians capture strange transmissions through their satellites. Human kind is not alone in the universe, and you know it.
The game has all the qualities I stated above but, as I mentioned, had many design mistakes as well. Not bugs, no. The designers made some wrong choices when conceiving Reunion, preventing it from being a big hit. First of all, and probably the most important: some of the technologies you need to complete the game can only be discovered by trial and error, and you need a lot of luck. The universe is huge, each solar system with lots of planets with their own satellites. You don't have clues, you simply need to explore them in all ways possible. It's hard to figure out everything, and I think it's very unlikely that someone completes this game without a walkthrough (although a friend of mine did). Also, the game has an unreal timing. Even when controlling one single planet, your opponents throw impossible armies at you from time to time, so you better be quick in vanquishing them. I love challenging games, but "illogically challenging" usually feels frustrating. And that's what this game is, for many people.
I recommend this game only to die-hard strategists. I love it, really, but I hate it at the same time. It's ironic, I don't know. You'll certainly be caught by its in-depth and the twists in the story line. But take a walkthrough with you, just in case.
