I tend to enjoy board games most in video game form. Titles like Carcassonne or Catan take the busywork out of setting up a complicated game. Risk: Factions isn't content to be a mere "port" of the classic board game. Instead, it riffs on a complex game, while keeping the spirit of the original alive.
In many ways, Factions doesn't stray far from the source material. Armies claim territories, and you roll virtual dice to determine battle victors. The game can be won by controlling territory, or by fulfilling objectives that grant bonuses. For purists, it even includes a Classic mode with the standard world map, along with a wealth of new maps developed for Factions mode.
It's in these factions that the game differentiates itself from its board game brethren. Through the campaign, we meet the five groups that make up the color-coded armies: Humans, Cats, Robots, Zombies, and Yetis. For a game called Risk: Factions, though, the factions themselves are pretty superficial. All of the army leaders add character to the game, hold together the light story, and make for amusing battle animations between dueling armies. Besides those slight flourishes, though, they don't actually do anything.
The game does add interesting wrinkles to the Risk we all know. Capturing several of the Zombie army's Crypts, for example, lets players freeze a section of the map temporarily, keeping it safe from attack, or preventing enemy units from attacking. Controlling Barracks, on the other hand, can grant access to a missile silo that boosts battle power. These powers seem like a perfect fit for the factions -- Crypts for zombies, Barracks for humans, etc. -- but they're available to whichever faction happens to control the land. These twists kept me on my toes by adding an extra layer of complexity, but at the same time they served to accent how the faction motif is a missed opportunity.
