Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: BattleGoat Studios
Minimum requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista; Pentium III 800+Mhz; 512 MB RAM; 3D Graphics Card with 16MB+ Video RAM; DirectX 8.1 or Higher; DirectX Compatible Sound Card
Genre: Strategy
Release date: Available now
Review by: Andrew Clark

I’ll begin by saying this: The folks over at BattleGoat had better be wrong about the “near future” setting in which their games take place. Every passing day leans more and more to a potential world collapse…a “global crisis,” if you will. Tanking economy; budding, unfriendly nuclear powers—it’s all being thrown into a big steel bowl buttered with instability and corruption. So if the mixing blade drops, I guess it’s good to know that Supreme Ruler players will have the experience necessary to lead us back to normalcy.

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Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Frictional Games
Minimum requirements: Windows 2000\XP, 1.5 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 2 GB hard drive space, Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 video card (GeForce 4 MX not supported)
Genre: Action Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Have you ever walked into a movie 30 minutes late and spent the next hour and a half trying to figure out what’s going on? Did you start watching Lost in Season 3, only to give up a few episodes in because you had no idea what was happening and why? This is the problem I faced when I fired up Penumbra: Requiem, the third game in developer Frictional Games’ horror adventure series. Without knowledge of the series’ back-story, I’m left to evaluate the game on face value, which reveals a combination of Mystian puzzle solving and an interface that turned my mouse into a Wiimote.

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Publisher: Dreamspike Studios
Developer: Dreamspike Studios
Minimum requirements: Windows 95/98/NT/XP/Vista, 85 MB hard-drive space
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

I’m old enough to remember the days when programmers would write their games on their own in their basements, copying them onto cassette tapes and selling them in plastic sandwich bags. Those days are long gone, but every so often the spirit of the independent game designer pops back up into the modern gaming world. Such is the case with Space War Commander, a decidedly low-tech but surprisingly engaging strategy game from Gamespike Studios.

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