Malkari

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Review: Malkari

Many of you won't.

Appreciating Malkari requires a seriousness about wargaming that approaches masochism. There's an astonishing, and overbearing, amount of detail here.

But this isn't that vivid, splashy Master of Orion detail or the rigid, elegant spreadsheet detail of a game like Stars where every number plugs neatly and obediently into the system. This is the sort of detail that involves taking a deep breath, plowing through the interface for a few hours until it's moderately familiar, and then really getting down to brass tacks.

You'll have to print out tables from the online reference and study them. You'll have to thumb through the barely adequate manual with its barely adequate index wondering where you saw that passage on Concussion Weapons or Construction Capacity. You'll have to run tests to figure out stuff like how power works, which resources are important, the best ship designs, the distinctions between the different guilds, and even what exactly the victory conditions are.

But once you've ascended this formidable learning curve (actually, it's more of a cliff), you'll find quite the game waiting for you at the mountaintop.

Malkari is a turn-based contest over two asteroid belts spinning away like shattered train wheels. This constantly shifting map is one of the most maddening and intriguing aspects of the game. Imagine the geopolitical implications of Washington D.C. gradually swapping places with Madagascar and you get an idea of how Malkari plays. The asteroid mining premise glosses over concepts like population growth and colonist morale. In fact, the only sign of life is a shipbuilding resource referred to as "organics". Research is streamlined so that you discover advances based on the things you build. As the game progresses, you earn points to gradually steer the direction of your research.

The heart of the game is setting up mining operations, designing ships, and managing fleets. To exploit an asteroid's resources, you'll send ATVs crawling over its surface to squat in choice areas and suck metal or generate power to refuel visiting ships. The ship design is easily the most sophisticated you'll find in any space game, with each guild having its own unique components.

This is where the bulk of the game balance is hidden. Because ship designs can vary so widely, combat is a tense game of matching strengths against your opponent's weaknesses. Battles (both on asteroids and in space) are fluid and extended, with lots of thrusts, parries, retreats, and advances spread across several turns, all played out on the same maps as the actual game. This lends Malkari a much more epic and immediate feel than games in which stacks of units dual to the death on a separate tactical screen.

Malkari is shot through with bad graphics rendered in stiff, unaccelerated 3D. At least the displays are uncluttered and can be strained through several filters. A robust message system alerts you to as much or little information as you want. The interface could have used a bit more polish in some areas, particularly at the asteroid level, which requires far too much micro-management. But considering the complexity of the game-specifically, the shifting asteroid map--Interactive Magic has done an impressive job of making everything manageable.

It's a shame that this is the company's last non-online game. I would have loved to have seen this design team's future projects. Instead, Interactive Magic has gone out with a polyphonic swan song as intricate as a Bach cantata. Malkari is guaranteed a long hard-drive life among hardcore strategy gamers who can stand the delicious abuse of being buried under detail, complexity, and nuance.-- Tom Chick / GamePro