Risk has been around longer than video games, having been ported from the tabletop to the digital medium countless times since the inception of modern electronic games almost three decades ago. Nevertheless, EA felt it was time for a bit of house cleaning to be done and while Risk: Factions doesn’t necessarily set out to reinvent the strategy genre as we all know it, there are a few creative liberties enacted in an attempt to garner the game some newly found relevance. Receiving it’s namesake from the fact that it isn’t just human armies attempting to wipe each other off the map in the name of world domination, Factions does offer a fresh take on the existing source material. Players can now assume control of Feline, Robotic, Zombie and Yeti armies in addition to the standard Humans. While the differences may seem subtly aesthetic at first, they do lend a decidedly interesting change to the game. Proffering a five mission campaign is basically the quickest introduction the game has to get players accustomed to how the game works, serving more as a form of training grounds for multiplayer than anything else. Each campaign mission will gradually introduce new, obtuse elements as well as toss an additional AI-controlled character.
Progressing through the five missions should take more than a few hours with the end result being a competent, competitive player capable of venturing online with a reasonable understanding and expectation of victory. Each mission encapsulates each respective faction either dominating the board or meeting three of various offered objective. These objectives can include anything from “Capture 3 barracks,” to “Conquer 9 territories in one turn” – making them either very easy or very difficult depending on whether or not you accomplish them first – since none of them are repeatable. Thankfully for the sake of competitiveness, the amount of difficult objectives far outweighs the easy ones, making a fast victory virtually impossible. While strategy will always be the primary tenet of the Risk franchise, those creative liberties discussed earlier definitely can help level the playing field. For instance, by capturing 3 out of 5 barracks on one map allows a player to capture a missile floating on a platform in a center of a lake landlocked by the adjacent territories. While this may sound like a player then has the ability to attack or bomb any location on the map back to the Stone Age, it actually gives them possession of an additional attack or defense dice within a certain radius of the missile, which definitely comes in handy tactically down the line.
Additionally, players can capture crypts and should all the necessary locales be taken and defended can be used to freeze a territory for a turn, preventing it from attack or being attacked – essentially removing it from the overall strategic equation for a turn. There is also a dam that, if held, allows a player to flood an entire continent reducing the troop count to one, making a sweeping attack of the entire area possible. However, more than once, I noticed this backfire on an impetuous AI. Finally and most powerful would be The Temple, which can convert a territory and all the units contained therein over to your side. Say you have an opponent building up across the map, simply convert his army and devastate them. This, of course, assumes that the player can hold the three areas around the temple for a turn, allowing its use to be enabled. It should also be mentioned that Classic Risk can also be played, removing objectives as well as overkills maneuvers, simply bringing it down to the luck contained within a set of digital dice. The rolls do seem fair for the most part; nevertheless, I find it a bit asinine that on a few occasions where I was numerically superior with at least a ten to one ratio of armies, I failed to secure the country I was attacking. A rarity, but still occurred far too often to avoid being mentioned, as it stuck out as one of the primarily frustrating elements the game had to offer.
Ultimately devoid of moments of grandeur that caused me to envision myself riding a white horse on to victory in the name of my respective army, I still found myself endeared to the exceptionally well animated cutscenes between campaign missions as well as lack of cleanup required that went with throwing the tabletop version across the room after losing Ukraine on a veritable fluke of a dice roll. Regardless of skill level, the single-player of Risk: Factions will certainly appeal to people who have been tossed out of Risk games as sore losers or who have lost friends to a post-game beating following a particularly severe loss. The multiplayer was smooth during my brief time with it and feel overall well put together with tight controls succinctly explained to players and onlookers alike. My only real remaining complaint revolves around the lack of unique composed music that can grow repetitive after playing through the same game alone for a lengthy amount of time. Otherwise, Risk: Factions survives the proving grounds as a competently designed, if not elementary strategy title that brings a lot of new ideas to a remarkably aged franchise without utterly breaking the established rules in a way that would alienate lifelong players or chase off recruits who are still a bit green. Risk: Factions is currently available exclusively on Xbox Live Arcade.
