3D engine
With DR2's 3D viewing system, we can zoom in on units in action, ambush them behind hills, zoom out as far as we would like and get a birds eye view of the battleground, or go deep into the water and deploy a fleet of submarines for a surprise attack.

Day and Night
Another promising feature of Dark Reign 2 is its real time day and night transition, which will extend the playability of the game. Which ever strategy you choose to employ during the day will inevitably have to be changed as the sun starts to set.

Physics: E=MC²
Dark Reign 2's physics model also deserves special mentioning. All units will be subject to a fiendishly detailed physics model. Units can fall off cliffs, roll backwards down slopes, even be pushed around if in the immediate vicinity of an explosion. this feature will most certainly provide for some very interesting gameplay.

MRM(multi resolution mesh)
by using Intel's new MRM technology, the Developers of DR2 are able to provide the gamers (especially the classic pentium owners) with superb graphics whilst mantaining a reasonably good frame rate. Unlike most 3d games where multiple renderings are required, MRM needs only one, high-detail rendering. MRM then automatically drops polygons depending on several things: processor speed, graphics card, distance the unit is from the camera, et cetera, of course, you do need a 3D graphics card.

Conclusion
Dark Reign 2 will unquestionably be the best game of 2000, and will set the standards for future RTS games.For more information on this game, check out our links page. and also visit the Pandemic Studio Discussion board for the latest gossips 'bout DR2.

Do yourself a favour, join this league and enjoy all that Dark Reign 2 has to offer. Still not tempted? then here are some more screen shots:

Story:

The year is 2512. The Earth is a wasteland. Despite remarkable advances in genetic and environmental engineering, the weight of pollution and overpopulation have nearly exhausted the planet?s facility for supporting human life. Not everyone suffers, however. The elite of society have constructed agricultural and residential ?domes? in which a relatively safe and comfortable living environment are sustained artificially. Outside these domes, the great majority of humanity lives in vast ?sprawls?, unprotected from the toxic air and the harsh solar radiation from which the whispy remnant of Earth?s ozone layer can no longer protect them.

Despite these hardships, life for this challenged majority goes on, and society has reinvented itself to conform to the new realities of life on Earth in the 26th Century. The human polity has gradually reorganized into ?tribes?, which act variously as social infrastructures, religious groups, militias and trade cartels as the need arises. While not enjoying the physical advantages of the residents of the domes, denizens of the sprawls have proven highly inventive and adaptive, and depending on the observer?s perspective could in many ways be considered more advanced than the dome-dwellers: necessity has dictated that they innovate in order to survive, and they have risen to the challenge.

Life among the Tribes is not for the weak or timid, however. It is not a gentle world, and in most cases the rule of law has been completely replaced by the rule of force. Justice is delivered at the tip of a weapon rather than the fall of a gavel, and those who possess the greatest fighting prowess generally run Tribe society. And the Tribes are always fighting amongst themselves. Turf wars and blood feuds are part of the natural order of society.

Even among the young, violence is considered an everyday occurrence in the sprawls, and over the years the lust for combat seems to have been bred into the tribe populace.

The maintenance of the comparatively softer life of the domes would seem by far more desirable, but that life comes to dome residents at a price. Dome dwellers have become extremely dependent on a once obscure law enforcement processing organization, the JDA, to keep their positions of comfort and safety secure. The JDA (Jovian Detention Authority) was originally founded to process the transfer of violent criminals from Earth to the new prison facilities constructed on the moons of Jupiter. It quickly became apparent to many overburdened earth governments, however, that the more people who could be deemed dangerous, the more people could be deported from the overcrowded surface of the earth.

By the 26th Century, scores of people are rounded up daily by JDA patrols and carted off to processing stations to await the long voyage to the grim, icy prisons on Io and Callisto. This ?reign of terror? and arbitrary law is kept in place not only as a means of controlling population growth but also as a convenient way of keeping the Tribes fearful of JDA power and of getting rid of any of their number who gains enough political sway to possibly unite the Tribes under a single banner. The JDA is a prison patrol that has become a police force that has become an army, and the residents of the domes realize only too well that their disciplined legions are all that stand between them and the teeming, hungry masses in the sprawls below. And now it seems to many in these troubled times, both Tribesmen and dome dwellers, that this volatile social model cannot persist, that one day the JDA may take something or someone whom the Tribes feel they cannot afford to surrender, that the JDA?s very instrument of control may become the hammer that drives the world into chaos and open war.

story copyright © 1999 pandemic studios all rights reserved.