Game:

Dark Colony (1997)

Duration: 3:48

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https://www.myabandonware.com/game/dark-colony-49w

http://web.archive.org/web/19980613191954/http://www.gametek.com/dark/index.html

The great RTS of 1997, and the predecessor to Starcraft 1998. Dark Colony will always have a soft spot in my heart. It was the first RTS to use night/day as a tactical advantage for sight-radius depending on your race; obviously, Greys could see further during the night and humans in the day.

Though the races were mirrored like Warcraft 2, the key differences of your medium fire-power unit (scythe-demons and reapers-mechs) made all the difference when combined with the night and day cycles. Demons had melee range but attacked more quickly, while Reapers had a very short ranged attack but attack more slowly. Also, the game had heroes by default, with one commander and one alien council member with one special ability each; Commanders could summon a dropship with a certain amount of units depending on their selected rank — aliens a saucer, or saucers, depending on their rank to abduct enemy units permanently.

The game also introduced missions similar to Starcraft and Warcraft 2 where you would escort your hero through a dungeon type of area to find artifacts and move forward in the game.

Now by far the most interesting thing about Dark Colony is the artifacts. When turned on for a multiplayer game (and obviously present in the game's dual campaigns) your resource unit can harvest up to 5 different artifacts with incredibly overpowered abilities (such as making every unit in an area kill each other, or simply fire off deadly spinning blades of death all over the map killing literally everything (even your own units). Like Petra-7, the resource that started the little alien-human war on MARS, artifacts are fought for between the races as an advantage in battle and for the future of their species.

In conclusion:
The game is mint. Download it as freeware and play that shit. It's hyper violent and has many cutscenes just like Starcraft to reward you for your play. It's also INCREDIBLY difficult if you don't win in under 15 - 20 minutes, as the enemy masses to an outrageous extent. The game can actually be made quite trivial if you simply mass mechs or sy-demons ASAP and assault the enemy.

“I don’t know if you can understand me, you pasty faced maggot. But that’s the way that I say it, you bugged eyed freak. “

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