Risk: World Domination is so boring and slow that I'm even playing it right now as I write this review. In fact, I'm kicking ass and taking names. In a minute or two, I might even be playing again. If I could, I'd play online, but, well, first things first.
Gameplay
The core of the game hasn't changed from the original. Choose your countries, set up armies, take turns waging war, and turn in sets of cards for more armies. There are a few options to tweak the game, but they're pretty minor, like changing the rules of the army awards for sets of cards.
Beyond the standard global domination goal, there are a couple of fun variations, but nothing that couldn't be done on the original board game. Capital Risk lets players choose a territory as their capital and the first to capture all of them at once wins. Secret Mission Risk gives each player a special assignment, like controlling 24 territories or killing a certain enemy, and the first to complete it takes the game.
The big selling point of R:GD is the online play, but that's assuming that you can even play it online. Just think of it -- Risk online. Everyone has played Risk and, now that many people are going online with their consoles, it's a logical, smart step. However, getting online is another story. With the final version that was released to stores, I was unable to connect to any games online. After several ventures online, no one was available to play. No people were online. Nobody. We tried for a week.
After talking to the Atari tech support, I tried playing from home off of an Ethernet cable that comes from my house router that is connected to a DSL modem. Still no luck. According to the manual, I needed to go into my router and change some numbers for the ports so that the game can play. In other words, R:GD was unable to play online unless I was willing to hack into my own router. Since it's not my router and I didn't have the manual for it, I was unable to play a network game. I was stuck with the offline version. Not good.
Thus, after numerous attempts using the store-bought version, and having set up two special meetings to play with Atari's tech people, we were still unable to get online. Seeing that R:GD is a game designed for the casual gamer, designed to be plug-and-play, it fails on both accounts and made us wonder why were working so hard. Why? We could just as easily grab the shareware version and happily play. Or...we could buy the board version with friends. Fancy that.
If the offline game was decent, it's possible that R:GD would be worth a discount purchase, but it's quite possibly one of the worst translations of a board game to console I've ever seen. Casual gamers beware.
Graphics
Seeming to think that the solution to making a board game a console game, Cyberlore has seemingly dumped 3D animation upon animation and forgot about the game entirely. Battles involve the camera zooming in the two territories battling, soldiers and cavalry units getting ready for battle, and showing the dice rolls and explosions of each attack. It would be cute if this happened for the beginning or maybe the first battle of a turn, but it grows old quick.
Fortunately, these supposed features can be minimized a bit with the "Fast AI and Fast Defend" options, but even that doesn't help cut down the amount of time it takes to play. In a six-player game with five computer opponents, it took at least two minutes for all of the computer units to make their plays before I could play again. Often it would take three or four minutes and the record is over six minutes. For all of these stretches of time there was absolutely nothing for me to do. If anyone wanted to play against a friend, I would strongly suggest getting the regular board game, it'll be more fun and you won't have to watch armies move around for a couple hours.
Sound
The audio is filled with inane comments by the computer characters. As famous leaders from world history, they have an accented phrase for every type of action on the screen. One of the worst was, "it's not the size of the army, it's what you do with it," which was used over and over again as I allocated my armies in the beginning of my turn.
Beyond the graphics taking extra time, these comments pause the gameplay even more. Like the graphics animations, the sound options aren't located in the main menu options. You'll have to start a game, pause it and then by accident (unless you have read the manual or this review) switch off the Sound and voice effects. So, in other words, you can change the game from its default mode if you want to make it work, but getting to that point isn't going to be fun. And games should be fun. And easy to get into. Unlike this.