by lumin
I just ordered this game on Amazon as I've been thinking about picking this up for a year or two, but finally got the nerve to pull the trigger. From everything I've read, this sounds like an amazing game-play experience and I'm totally excited to jump in the deep end. The components look great, and it appears that the devs put a great deal of thought to balance it out and to provide an amazing experience.On the other-hand, the part of this game I feel is quite lacking is the theme and back-story. Perhaps there is a lot of story that comes out during play from the cards/extra rules, but just reading the starting rules, I have to admit that the lore (or "mythos" if you will) is pretty darn sparse for this game. I think that's a little sad - all the work that went into the mechanical and component side of the game seems great, but fleshing out the factions seemed to have gotten the short end of the stick.
And I just have to say, the initial story-line is pretty terrible. The ability to create new clones of Earth? That's about the worst Deus Ex Machina scenario I've ever heard. Yeah, I get that we're supposed to be starting off with a clean slate so we can write the new Earth's "story" and all that. But, couldn't we do practically the same thing with a post-apocalyptic world where new factions are rising up from the ashes of the old? That story-line seems to have a little more character to me. Granted, you'd have to start the factions off in the general geographic area as their ancestors, but that's not a big sacrifice to make.
That brings me to my second problem. The descriptions on the factions themselves is lacking. I want to get some deeper history on these factions, and the world in general come 2128 (or whenever this game starts off). How did the Imperial Balkania come about? Descendants of the old Soviet Union and East European states? The Enclave of the Bear sounds like a faction evolved from the far northern Russian territories (Picture Zangief from Street Fighter 2). What happened to the United States, did their descendants form the Die Mechaniker or Khan Industries. What happened to the EU and China?
I think there is some great potential here for some more extensive story, just to set things up. A post-nuclear situation provides a nice back-drop to give some context for these factions and how they came about. A cloned-Earth situation is just so sterile and boring to me.
I've heard that this game may lie in the Risk 2210 universe, if so, does that game provide more context to this?