A while back, I talked about Defender of the Crown, and about games which incorporated different types of gameplay. This time, I’ll talk about another one of my old favorites which share that characteristic: North & South.
At the core, this is also a territory acquisition game – you move your troops around, attacking your opponent, with the goal of owning all territories.
When you do attack an opponent though, you’ll get this battle screen, where you control your artillery, cavalry and infantry. It’s quite tricky at first, but after a while you get the hang of it, and it truly becomes a matter of skill whether you win or lose.
Some territories have a fortress (the red dots on the map) and if you attack one of them, you get yet another play mode: a side scrolling plaform-style game, where you have to fight soldiers and dodge dogs, to reach the end before time runs out.
There’s a bunch of other elements to it as well. You can get reinforcements by ship if you own a specific territory (one of the ones on the right hand side) or by getting enough gold, which you get when the train pass from one fortress to another (though your opponent can try to rob the train, in a game mode similar to invading a fortress). There’s also a cloud moving across the map, and whenever it goes across one of your territories, you are unable to move those troops. On the left hand side, there’s an indian chief and a mexican, and occasionally they will attack and obliterate ome of the troops in adjacent territories.
I think this game is another fine example of a game where they have combined a few different types of game modes in a way which works really well. I have’t seen much in terms of strategy games which incorporate arcade action in recent years, which is a bit of a shame – it’s such a nice concept.
