Cardinal of the Kremlin is a Strategy game that makes you the controller of the Top Secret “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. The game is complex – I had to find and read instructions on the game before playing – and is extremely hard to beat on the default difficulty setting. Hit D within the first 10 days of gameplay, however, and that can be changed – which comes in handy.
The gameplay is actually quite fun once you get used to it, but the monotony sets in fairly soon afterwards.
Cardinal of the Kremlin is a Strategy game that makes you the controller of the Top Secret “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. The game is complex – I had to find and read instructions on the game before playing – and is extremely hard to beat on the default difficulty setting. Hit D within the first 10 days of gameplay, however, and that can be changed – which comes in handy.
The gameplay is actually quite fun once you get used to it, but the monotony sets in fairly soon afterwards. You keep doing the same things over and over again, trying to manage your research, testing, security and espionage. You also have tactical gameplay in the form of a top-down view of “The Archer”,
an Afghan militant trying to free his country from Soviet occupation. All of these factors play into your attempts to beat the Soviet Union in a race against the clock to develop your missile defense program first. To do this, you have to hire department heads, ensure their security with agents from the FBI, manage their testing, monitor the soviet program, try to get intel from field agents working in Russia, and also launch satellites into orbit to do recon, testing, tracking and targeting. Trying to master the game is difficult, but at the easier levels you’ll have a better time of doing it.
The graphics are not bad for the time period, the sound doesn’t work unless you have a DOS emulator other than the Windows version and the controls are difficult at times, but it has its qualities in the challenge that the game provides. Cardinal of the Kremlin is worth it if you’re a die-hard Clancy fan.
