ParaWorld takes place in a bizarre parallel dimension that seems one part Dinotopia, two parts Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and a little bit of Jurassic Park thrown in for good measure. In this world are three human tribes who live, work with and fight against a variety of dinosaurs and each other. The Dragon Clan is based on Asian culture and is built around their monopoly on explosives (their Seismosaurus unit boasts a mortar and Gatling guns) and their skill with machinery, which they use to build devilishly tricky traps. The Dust Riders seem to be patterned more after North African nomad tribes and have weaker, but more mobile armies. Finally, the Norsemen are Viking-inspired warriors who tend to use more prehistoric mammals than dinosaurs. Two of their best units are a mammoth that acts as a super resource gatherer and a Battle Rhino that seems to take great pleasure in stamping down enemy huts.
What makes the game really interesting, however, isn't the premise, but how well Sunflowers can implement it and carry it off. They've certainly got the absurdist style down right. The units in ParaWorld run the gamut from basic infantry like spearmen and axmen to ranged units like bowmen to a variety of tank, troop carrier, artillery, and siege units. In playing the game, however, I was most impressed with the sheer creativity of the designs that Sunflowers has come up with to fill each of these standard military roles. My personal favorites so far include a dinosaur that launches eggs over walls which hatch into raptors, and a Kentrosaurus unit wearing armor with a ridiculous amount of spikes on it. Remember the drawings you did as a kid of a T-Rex with a machine gun mounted to its head? Something like that's in here, and you'll get to control it and watch as it eats enemy infantry. ParaWorld's creature designs are deliciously, gloriously insane.
All that, however, means nothing without a decent strategic game to back it up. Here, too, the signs look promising. ParaWorld follows recent RTS trends with a strategic bias toward aggressive gameplay, lots of movement, and an emphasis on unit management rather than basic logistics. Units are very specialized. Norsemen Lancer infantry, for example, are designed for use against mounted units and are helpless up close. The Allosaurus, on the other hand, is solely an infantry killer. They won't even attack buildings and are pretty helpless against ranged artillery and siege machines.
