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Review:

1st July 2005:
The Day After
The Cuban Missile crisis has escalated and president John F Kennedy has made the final decision to go nuclear. Now survival is the only option.
Posted by Chris Snook - PC - UK and Europe

Blackbean games are starting to forge a name for themselves with interesting and innovative approaches to titles. Their latest offering in the field of strategy, The Day After continues this trend and supplies us with again something quite different.

It is 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis became white hot, Fidel Castro, three years after his coup is a figure of fear, hate and suspicion amongst the political elite of the United States of America. Now there is a further tightening of tension as it is revealed that the Soviet Union is assisting their communist comrades by the supply of missiles on the large Caribbean island. Diplomacy breaks down and opposing forces mass ready for conflict, even as a warning is issued that if a single US plane is shot down the bombing will commence immediately. A few days later a U2 spy plane was indeed downed and the world went nuclear.

From the ashes of the nuclear fires four power Blocs rise to continue the battle, this tie not for ideology or anything as intangible but for survival, resources and what remains of a shattered planet. Crisis governments vie to protect their interests as the world dies beneath their feet.

The Day After is a rare beast. A fusion of two related but distinct sub-sects of the strategy game market that have been welded together into a well conceived whole. Rooted in a semi-historical situation, spread over three years and potentially encompassing the whole globe through four distinct but linked campaigns, The Day After proves to be up to the task.

Everything is functional, reflecting a kind of sixties ethos where flower power died on the currents of a nuclear wind. There is no fuss and it is a delight to use a clean interface for most things. The level of detail within the information areas of the menus is quit impressive, with an encyclopaedia of the various weapons, vehicles and the like giving histories and possible uses for the budding general, there are even mouseovers when you point to a particular statistic of a weapon. A weapons buff could loose an hour or so just reading up on what was about in the early nineteen sixties.

There is a tutorial and it quite nicely lays up the groundwork for the rest of the game, giving information on both the turn based and the real-time strategy elements, showing how the merge together to deliver the unique feel for the game. You actually do feel like an army General plotting a mission and then becoming the field commander chosen to carry out the offensive itself. This being the spine of the game the planning is done in a simplified 'Risk' style with you selecting objectives to take and when and where to fight your battles. All depicted on a nice clear map.

Visually the functional, pared down look works within the turn based areas, things are crisp and the interface is not cluttered and is clear and simple to use. Again in the RTS the graphics are clean and whilst detailed are also simple, they move and act fine due to using what looks like the Stalingrad engine to deliver the goods.

Music is evocative of the mood, sombre, militaristic and sets the tone nearly perfectly. The world is at war and this time it is for keeps. Environmental sounds and spot effects work nicely but are at times repetitive, only so many ways to sound a tank gun or the revving of an engine. There is speech, in the language of the sides taking part, be it Russian, English, Chinese or French/German, reflecting the units origins.

With four campaigns, multiple missions and the mastery of the different elements, strategic planning and tactical combat there is plenty to be getting on with. The tutorial is pitched just right, the Weapons and Armament encyclopaedia as already mentioned add depth and detail to things and the attention to the briefings is immense. Plus if you have a few friends about a LAN game can be set up for multiplayer competitions.

There are problems, many will not like that there is a turn based factor, with no recourse to just leaping straight into the action. Interestingly there is an option to autofight battles so that you can just stay in turn mode. In addition the strongest element of the game, the engine is also the one that leaves you thinking that you have only just seen this a few weeks ago as it does employ many of the same elements as its apparent sibling Stalingrad. Indeed if you have played that game then you can almost ignore the RTS element of the tutorial. Controls are simple and again the interface is a joy to use, with commands being issued swiftly. Other than that there are no real surprises in the gameplay with options to give you an advantage fairly used - despite this aid though, the AI will give you a good challenge. There are also spelling errors and some grammatical glitches in the text, nothing major and it is all cosmetic. It should be mentioned that a patch does exist for the game, this was not able to be tested on the review copy to see if it corrected any of these problems.

It is the sheer audacity of the material that is the greatest achievement. Taking a well known point in history and showing us what another path through history could be like and delivering a satisfyingly crafted scenario in the process and for that it should at least be looked at.

Chris Snook

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Review Summary:

The world has ended and the remnants of the various militaries are already scrabbling to try and survive long enough to preserve any hope of their part of humanity being supreme. A clever and well executed depiction of the kind of war that would have been welcomed by many and feared for so long by everyone else as it blends turn based and real-time styles of strategy into one whole package.

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