On an impulse today, I pur­chased Risk: Fac­tions on Steam. At full price, no less! It’s been ages since I bought a game on Steam that wasn’t on sale. In fact, their awe­some sales prob­a­bly have got­ten me to buy games I oth­er­wise wouldn’t have both­ered with. But that’s beside the point.

Here’s a trailer for the game:

It actu­ally came out last June for XBOX and in Decem­ber for PlaySta­tion, but was released on Steam this week. The art direc­tion is pretty cool, it reminds me of Penny Arcade. The fac­tions are only graph­i­cally unique as far as I can tell, despite claims that they have “unique abil­i­ties.” The cam­paign is actu­ally very short (one mis­sion per fac­tion) and basi­cally serves as an intro­duc­tion to the var­i­ous fac­tions (with nice between-​mission videos) and a tuto­r­ial that cov­ers the new rules and spe­cial power pieces. That doesn’t mat­ter too much, though. It’s Risk!

Actu­ally, this is the first chance I’ve had to play with the new rules. Man, it is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent game. If any­thing, I feel like it’s too fast now. Maybe that’s just because the default AIs in this game are too weak and I’m not get­ting a change to be strate­gic enough. In the new rules, there are a set of pos­si­ble objec­tives that every­one races to claim. First one to com­plete three objec­tives wins. I beat one game in the first three rounds. The com­puter did not try to stop me at all, and def­i­nitely does not value the “spe­cial” new lands such as cap­i­tals (you need to keep con­trol of your own cap­i­tal to win) or lands which give you powers.

I’m look­ing for­ward to play­ing peo­ple with this, though. If you’re on Steam, get this and throw down with me! Oh, and yes, we can still play with Clas­sic Risk rules.