The sounds are solid but a little generic in some regards. You’re going to hear a lot of the same sounds over again and while they aren’t bad they aren’t something you’re going to sample and put on your cell phone (not like I’ve done that or anything…). There’s a nice soundtrack though, very nice and militaristic which really helps the mood of the game. Where the audio really falls apart though is the dialogue for the single player portion of the game. There are two parts to narration disaster. The first is that the script is horrible (a lot seems lost in the translation from Russian to English) and the second part is the voice talent they used. I use talent in the loosest sense of the word as the voice work is passable at best. There’s not a lot of consistency to any of it as the armies have too many dialects for you to take them seriously. It’s like they hired two guys who had a wide variety of bad impersonations so you get crummy Texas accent followed by bad Southern accent with a bit of bad Russian accent added in. I hate to harp on this but it was really painful to have to sit through all of the dialogue in the single player portion of the game.
The game also has a few little quirks including a few random lock up issues. Normally, these aren’t a problem but to have the game lock up two hours into battle is more than a bit frustrating. It looks like the patch that was released after the game shipped addressed this issue but it’s still not going to get me that time of my life back.
Despite the audio issues,
Domination is a great find for strategy gamers. There are just hours and hours of game play modes and there were more than a few nights where what was supposed to be a one hour gaming session turned into a three and four hour session. This is one of those rare sleeper games that Dreamcatcher seems to churn out each year (last year’s version was the fun FPS game
Painkiller).
B | Despite a few bugs and some atrocious dialog, Domination is a lot of fun and provides a great deal of bang for the buck. |
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