Without much fuss and advert, Activision silently published Dark Reign Redux, a remake of the 1997's RTS Dark Reign: The Future of War on Xbox Live Indie Games.
The original was developed by Auran and published by Activision. The game itself consisted on a large scale single-player campaign but it supported, already in its time, multiplayer online games. You also had the a mission construction kit included in the game which allowed players to create their own maps and missions.
The game was followed by an expansion pack released in 1998 called Dark Reign: Rise of the Shadowhand had even more mission and new units. Due to its huge success a prequel was released in middle of 2000 called Dark Reign 2.
Dark Reign 1, Single Player Intro
In Dark Reign Redux, you are presented with 12 missions that can be played from the perspective of either the Freedom Guard or the Imperium, plus one final Togran mission. The development of this project was made by Magnetar Games that reached a licensing agreement with Activision making it being release on the Indie Games Section (Kotaku.com). According to their official website the plot is as follows:
With the population rapidly growing too large for the limited resources of Earth, the government started shipping criminals to penal colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Neptune. This could only provide temporary relief, though. Then the government got the idea to use prisoners for the dangerous task of establishing new colonies. Seduced by the promise of freedom, many prisoners volunteered for the job. Freedom was an illusion, though. As a final step to prepare the new colonies, the government rounded up all of the prisoners and shipped them to other new planets to start again. The prisoners quickly grew tired of this treatment and revolted.The Imperium government decided they needed a stronger way to identify and control prisoners. They had the prisoners injected with a heritable genetic key that ended their lives at the age of 25, and marked them with a completely black left eye. Not knowing the source of this curse, the “Marked” became disheartened and much easier to control. When colonization was no longer a pressing need, they were easily transitioned to the role of indentured servants. But then research into the genetic mark showed that it was manmade. The Marked and many sympathizers revolted against the Imperium. The Freedom Guard army was organized, and galactic war broke out.A third side soon found themselves caught in this war. The Tograns, a group of scientists who’d left Earth voluntarily long before the government built off-world colonies, found themselves in the middle of the destructive war. Though the Tograns had highly advanced technology, they had not planned for war. Their leader found himself caught on a planet targeted for destruction by a horrifying Imperium super weapon. In his last moment of life he released a probe into space that held the single chance to change the Tograns’ fate.
Widescreen and Normal Resolutions Supported
In addition, this port of the original game will have resolution of 1024x768 and wide-screen support (Armless Octopus cit. Kotaku.com) and you can get it for a simple price of $5 or 400 Microsoft Points. And really worth it if you ask me.
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