ParaWorld: The 3rd Best German Game of 2006

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ParaWorld is an RTS with dinosaurs. It is the second and final game released by the Berlin-based studio Spieleentwicklungskombinat GmbH (SEK), known to many of us as the developers of Diggles: The Myth of Fenris.

It was a very expensive game to develop, costing well over $8,000,000, making it the most expensive game developed by a German studio at the time. It did not sell very well, at less than $100,000 copies, leading to the immediate bankruptcy of the studio. And as far as German games in 2006 goes, it was overshadowed by both Gothic 3 and Anno 1701. ParaWorld just didn’t do enough different from the other RTS games that came out 10 years prior. And the RTS genre in general had already began a decade-long decline in popularity by 2006, making it an even more difficult game to sell.

However, if you have the patience to play through the game’s 20+ hour long campaign, then you’ll appreciate it for what it is. It’s weird, funny (by German humor standards), and lovingly-crafted. Although, if you don’t want to play it, I don’t blame you. Therefore, I’ve created this almost hour-long deep dive into the game, explaining basically every aspect of the game so that you can get enjoyment out of it in far less time.

Hope you enjoy this Retro Review!

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
4:00 How it plays
10:59 How it looks
15:41 How it sounds
18:47 The Story
52:20 Closing Thoughts
#Review #Retrogaming #ParaWorld

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B-Roll footage and music credits:
https://pastebin.com/vHKNP66w

Games shown in the intro in order of appearance:
Warcraft 3
Command & Conquer
Warcraft 2
Starcraft
Total Annhilation
Emperor: Battle for Dune
Machines!: Wired for War
Populous The Beginning
Dark Reign 2
Sacrifice
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth 2
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 3
Dune 2

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26 thoughts on “ParaWorld: The 3rd Best German Game of 2006”

  5. "incredibly realistic dinosaurs!" Shows giant mammals as lizards Jauwn do you not know the scientific consensus has changed on dinosaurs? If we drew all animals based on their bone structure ,ignoring the soft tissue that would have been there or feathers and other materials that don't survival fossilization without being in amber, they would also look horrific. We know the T-Rex is related to the chicken. When know the chickens little arms are part of it's wings. A T-rex would have wings. those little hands would be part of it. We know it's related to a bird, we know it should be bird like, but still we drew it as a giant reptile?

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  6. Basically exactly as I remembered it. Dinosaurs, cool, but then gameplay felt slow and clunky with no innovations when everyone was feeling some level of RTS fatigue, and the tone of the story didn't really work for me even back.

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  11. Basing this on info from another review.
    The unit management system was so good apperantly that the founder of the ESL (a german gaming Esport organization) left a quote on it stating that they knew what makes a EXCELLENT Esports title "The creators of ParaWorld have understood what ingredients you need for an excellent eSports-title"

    Also there are apperantly still people that play it, you just gotta search for them, a video creator by the name Doped Bones did a review where he coverd the game and talked about the mod side of it and included instructions how to help play the Multiplayer if someone here would be interested.

    With that said im glad to see this game has some attention thrown its way, speaking as someone who had a poster of this game hang on his wall for at least a decade with that Glorious Trex hanging above my bed.

    Thanks for covering it.

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  22. I'm glad this game is getting a bit more attention because for freaking years I felt like I was the only one who even knew of it and wondered if I hadn't dreamt it all up or something.
    Never forgot the badass pulp-style movie soundtrack either.

    Reply

  23. I think if you wanted to analyze decline of RTS games, I think more important factor would be them appealing entirely to hardcore esports players rather than regular gamers, so when they were replaced by MOBAs in esports circles the genre simply collapsed.
    At this point Pikmin is the only major high-profile RTS series still alive and they're thoroughly designed as "casual gamers' RTS".

    The niche for RTS games definitely still exists, it's just indie devs don't have resources to fill it, and major studios are interested only in chasing trends.

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