I am an avid fan of the popular board game Risk, but its not always easy to get together two other people to play the game. Plus, the average game takes hours upon hours to complete, because there is so much strategy involved. There have been computer game versions of Risk or Risk-like clones out for years. With this newest one, Risk II, we get a new way of playing.
Risk is a global conquering strategy game. You start out with X number of territories, most of which involve either countries or areas, and they are placed in seven continents. For example, Australia and South America only consists of 4 territories, which Europe consists of about 8. Once you know which territories are yours, you have X number of armies that you must place in each territory in order to defend it. What you want to do is figure out which continents you can completely take over and concentrate your armies in those areas.
At the beginning of each turn, you get 1 army for every three territories that you control, plus bonus armies for any continents that you control. The idea is to take over a continent then leave enough armies to defend it’s borders until the beginning of next turn. Otherwise, you could take over a continent, then the next player could take control of one of the territories in that continent, thus preventing you from getting the bonus armies. For every turn where you have at least one successful battle, you will get a card, and can later turn in those cards for bonus armies.
Risk II comes with two different version of the Risk board game. You can play the classic one, which is just like the original game, or a new real-time version. I will admit that I have interest in playing the real-time version, because these kinds of games require turn-based strategy. This is not like Warcraft, where real-time is needed to keep the game moving.
As much fun as playing Risk is, this game suffers from some of the more common problems found in good games that could be better. One is repetitiveness. When you get into a battle, you simply click a button to roll dice and see if you kill or are killed. After every victory, you get the same annoying cheer sound. It gets old really quick. This is your typical example of graphics and animation that are overused and serve no purpose of benefit to the game.
The sound in Risk II is nothing much to mention, since most of it is just explosion sounds or victory cheers. The menu music is some nice classic stuff, but most people don’t spend more than about 5 seconds in the menus anyway.
The AI in Risk II is very nice and the game can be quite difficult, especially if you don’t have any concentration of territories in one area. The computer plays using some of the basic rules of the game, and I have yet to see where any of the computer players go after one single person, like what often happens in the real-life board game.
All in all, this is a fun bargain bin game that can be picked up for less than $20 at most stores that still carry it. If you enjoy a quick game of Risk, you will like this title. If anything, put on some music and play it with the game with your computer speakers turned off.
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