Forum Overview :: Reviews

Obscure RTS's I've played by Fortinbras 05/28/2009, 3:18am PDT Between 2001 and 2004 I scrounged the bargain bins of my Gamestop for every last value game I could find. Mainly it was for Real Time Strategy games. I didn't get in on Quake other than playing a Playstation port of Arena sometime in the late 90's, I didn't become an Unreal Tournament addict until I bought a Geforce 4. But since I played Dune II on a Sega Genesis I knew what a Real Time Strategy game was. Along with the best RTS's to come out in 20 years, the early part of this decade came out with some much more obscure titles, some that ate ass and others that were pretty good but never got sequels. Conflict Zone: Modern War Strategy I'm not sure, but I think this is simultaneously the worst and yet most realistic real-time strategy game ever. Created by a company called the MASA Group, they've wisely turned away from video game design in the past 8 years in favor of designing software to assist civil servants and Second Life bots. It also had the worst possible release date ever: One month and two days after western nations stopped caring so much about humanitarian intervention and more about finding violent ways to put a stop to airliners being intentionally plowed into skyscrapers. Conflict Zone's premise is what compelled me to pick it up as a young, idiotic sixteen year old. For the first campaign you're sent into Kosovo-lite as Peacekeepers to kick ass and save civilians. Your funding is determined by some sort of Global Approval Rating. Civilians die, you lose your approval rating. Your guys get wounded and you don't fish them out with a Medevac Helicopter, you lose approval rating. In theory. I got through exactly one level of this shit, maybe two, before I couldn't take anymore. By the second campaign level you're forced to run a gauntlet of houses packed with anti-tank infantry which are surprisingly effective against riflemen. They also are effective against helicopters. This is pretty much the entirety of your available units: Helicopters, Mechanized Units, and Infantry. Meanwhile the clock is running down because civilians are being killed on the other side of this arbitrary gauntlet or SOMETHING, after fifty attempts I didn't even care. This game is so bad that cheating through it was unfulfilling, and yes I did endure that. I paid thirty to fifty bucks for this piece of shit and that's in teenager dollars. There's no plot other than three sentences telling you what your objectives are for each mission, the visuals were unappealing even by the standards of eight years ago. The whole "Public Opinion" angle really amounts to rescuing infantry/civilians with your Medevac Copter on hotkey and finishing a level before the opinion meter gets down all the way. At one point I wondered why more people didn't make RTS's based not on space operas or World War II but based in the mid-90's. Well these fucks sure gave me a compelling answer to that question. If I wanted to be some sort of chain smoking faggy beret wearing jackass complete with tenure at a university and a black turtleneck I would say that this game is ironic. It's supposed to highlight that war sucks and peacekeeping sucks and the United States sucks and we should get the fuck out of Kosovo. Too bad it cost me the price of a retail game to find out. There's always a chance I was thinking about it the wrong way, however. Just look at this bizarre Game Over sequence: One look at that and I think I'm just the victim of a very elaborate French performance artist's joke. Metal Fatigue Metal Fatigue is a Total Annihilation clone with giant robots and a battlefield partitioned into sky, ground, and underground. That's pretty much it in one sentence. The resource system is energy and can be produced infinitely and manpower which is produced by buildings (which are produced with energy only). There's a forgettable campaign involving three brothers who get split with three different generic corporations but the main draw is the robots. Like Metal Marines, your main combat unit is bipedal humanoid robots 50 feet tall that you can equip with various parts to make them specialize in various tasks like jet boots so they can reach the sky platforms, or a laser rifle and a sword for ranged and close combat action. They're heavily armored and are treated much like hero units, and building only a few of them can wipe out a much larger force of tiny tanks and other assorted generic units which you can build en masse. Much like Total Annihilation the battles are pretty huge with massive loss of equipment from even the smallest engagement. You can also find limbs of destroyed robots on the ground after a battle and bring them back to your base for research and reverse-engineering. Aside from the robots, the quirk is the triple-layered map. There's an atmospheric map on "top" of your regular generic surface battle with floating islands. You can build base structures on these islands as well as teleporters that can send units back down to the surface directly beneath where the teleporter is. Similarly, the underground area is buildable inside, and uses elevators to move between it and the surface. The sky areas are fun to play around in. Building fighters and attack-bombers and controlling the floating islands is a easy path to victory, as resource-collectors (solar panels) up there get a bonus and they're not easily attacked without having your own aerial base, or at least a substantial air force. The underground section, on the other hand is shit, and I almost never touched it. Unlike the aerial map where you can send as many fighters/bombers as you have available up at once en masse, the elevators form choke points and force your units to queue up and wait. To add insult to sodomy, your giant robots can't ride elevators down, making the underground area purely the realm of the shitty generic tanks you rarely ever use. And the game AI LOVES to build up insane numbers of units underground after you've destroyed him topside. Since victory conditions require every enemy building destroyed, the result is pure sodomy as you send down 20 tanks at a time to have them wiped out in a heartbeat by 150 MLRS. The only method of hitting the underground sections without taking the elevator is a strategic weapon that isn't available until late game. Along with these balance issues, there was a game-crashing memory leak that never got resolved as far as I know, or if it did it was after I had completely lost interest. It made multiplayer skirmishes impossible to play for more than 20 minutes, resulting in an even weaker product. Conquest: Frontier Wars This was the game I played before I had a 3D card. I love Conquest: Frontier Wars and if Windows Vista and my video card would permit it, I'd still install it today and play the single-player campaign all over again. This game had everything I wanted, 3-D rendered ships and nice effects, but with a more strategic map and gameplay than Homeworld and Homeworld Cataclysm. There's a lot right about this game, and it's more of a chore to tell you what's right with it than to just simply suggest you play Sins of a Solar Empire instead. The only differences in the two is Conquest Frontier Wars uses a supply system and its resources are finite. I fucking hate this supply system. See, every ship you build has a finite amount of ammo to spend in the service of killing shit for you, and when it's out it's out. It's fucking dead in the water and it ain't going to do anything except serve as target practice. To rectify this you either build supply stations at each planet you colonize/conquer (or at least one per system), and/or build supply ships to follow your fleets around as they tear shit up. But these ships take up ship capacity points that you could be throwing towards other, more dangerous vessels. It was a great concept and not entirely bad in its execution but it turns what can be slow, bloody progress across a campaign map (towards the later scenarios, you can cross over 20 solar systems, with several planets each) into a complete and utter crawl, as you have to send your entire supply convoy back to your nearest supply base to refill so they can refill your ships fighting on the front line. Ships will eat up supply very quickly, and they don't seem to have reservations about using enough ordnance to sink a battleship in order to swat down a corvette. And you have to micromanage these supply ships manually. A dynamic waypoint system that allowed you to tell your supply ships to automatically go back when they're empty would have made this all just a minor annoyance but it's just an unnecessary level of micromanagement on an otherwise very management-intensive game. Defensive installations can be placed in systems, but to be of much use you can't place them in the range of a planetary supply base, you need them at jump points which are the choke points between systems. Well guess what? They too require supply and on top of that they suck. So what you'll probably be doing is building yourself an offensive fleet, a defensive fleet, and supply ships to keep both happy, and you'll run into your unit cap in no time. On top of all this, the resource system is finite, the only infinite resource is manpower, which is mainly required by only one of the three factions, giving them a bit of a leg up. If you can't force a breakthrough early enough, you'll probably be headed for a very boring stalemate as you find neither you nor your opponent have enough ships to force the issue in a campaign level. These two problems aren't nearly as bad in multiplayer, with no arbitrary restrictions on tech trees, allowing you to build battleships as soon as you're able, and they're usually designed with competition in mind, so the distances between your front line and home aren't as bad. To make up for the fact you'll be playing it for 100 hours, the campaign is interesting enough with a few predictable plot "twists". In spite of these hang-ups, managing a multi-system fleet and watching fleets tear each other apart in Conquest Frontier Wars was amazing to watch and play in 2002. A sequel was forthcoming but Fever Pitch Studios folded while it was still in Alpha. Shattered Galaxy The only and last korean game I will ever play. Tom Chick didn't know what the fuck he was talking about when he reviewed this game. Shattered Galaxy, put out by NEXON, had the best damn premise ever and blew it on simplistic, unevolving gameplay and no sense of balance. In Shattered Galaxy there's a strategic map of about 60 or so territories, most of them thoroughly unremarkable, save for a central territory with the only repair facility other than the faction HQ's, and a couple of maps with special victory conditions. When two sides meet to fight over a territory, it becomes a real-time strategy battle of up to 20 players fielding 6 units at a time on each side. The sprites still look really nice today and there's a huge range of infantry, armored vehicles, aircraft, and biological units to choose from. You can try and specialize in one of the four categories, or just get two squads of each and slowly level up. At first it seems fairly interesting, and you feel like you're part of a strategic battle when things get crazy and there's 240 units on the screen all having a fucking shooting war across a flat plain, but what kills Shattered Galaxy is the same thing that kills most MMO's. Players and their tendency to find the cheapest, most boring way possible to win. Unit design in SG is somewhat customizable. You can give your units heavier armor, more effective guns, higher HP, more ammunition/energy, etc. However you can't have all of these at the same time, or if you do you'll have to settle for 2nd or 3rd rate. So what you'll usually have are two kinds of units: TANKS, people who outfit units with shit weapons but heavy armor that's almost impervious to most units fire. These units are designed to move and sit on the victory points on each map that determine who wins the territory. You can outnumber the other guys 5-1 and be blowing the shit out of their units all over but if they have some tank-units that you can't penetrate sitting on 3 out of 5 of the capture points, you're screwed. Then there are those who mount the biggest guns they can equip on their units and leave them with zero armor and health. There is no nuance, the playerbase of Shattered Galaxy has turned a unique customizable system into a binary choice of whether your units play meatshield and point-capturer or damage per second and glass cannon. So instead of an interesting strategic battle with units outflanking each other based on their merits, it's really based on who's got the heaviest armor stat and who's got the most damaging gun stats. Anybody who doesn't play the game this way is just a sucker and a victim in waiting. All the differences between infantry are cosmetic, aside from who can mount the heaviest armor and who can use the most powerful guns. The only meaningful choice you make is whether to equip guns that can shoot aircraft but not ground targets, guns that can shoot ground targets but not aircraft, or guns that can shoot both but are weaker in terms of overall power. Same with tanks, aircraft, etc. Speed is useless other than getting your armored units to a victory point before the other side. Flanking is pointless. Having the high ground is an invitation to get blown up. This game could have been interesting, with a bit of additional coding for flanking penalties, or giving certain unit types and weaponry bonuses against certain unit types or armor. But that won't ever happen. NEXON hasn't developed Shattered Galaxies in years, they just let the freeriders play on their own planet while suckers pay them a nominal fee to play on another. It's a monument to a failure to grasp a genius concept and improve it. And yet every few years I reinstall it and play for a few days with my Ghosts, Imps and Wraiths, occassionally finding myself in a battle along with a bunch of other people who aren't poopsockers freeriding the system for years, and we have a good time and an awesome battle.

Obscure RTS's I've played by Fortinbras 05/28/2009, 3:18am PDT