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| Grey Goo (Universe at War 2.0) by fabio 10/17/2015, 9:10am PDT | ||||
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| :Bland Edition
So it's made by the same former Westwood guys who made Universe at War, a competent but bland RTS with the one standout feature of one faction getting giant walker units. Now imagine removing the giant walker units and you have the exact experience of Grey Goo. It is exactly as bland as it sounds. You have the race that has to have everything connected by power lines but can quickly teleport units around, the race that can plop down building anywhere (using the Protoss pylon system) leading to some pretty ridiculous static defenses, and the third race they tried to do something unique with. Unfortunately the only thing differentiating each race is building placement: power lines, Protoss pylons, or the Goo which just rolls the refinery and factory into one mobile blob. You park the blob on a resource point and wait for it to accumulate enough so it can split off a smaller blob which can instantly morph into any unit. That's it. That's the only thing differentiating the races. Their units are EXACT reskinned copies (anti-personnel infantry, anti-armor infantry, anti-armor tank, anti-personnel artillery tank, anti-building tank, stealth tank, mine layer. That's it that's your whole arsenal). The Goo doesn't get air units, but air units are worthless so it doesn't matter. Quick! Can you guess which races is the humans and which is the aliens? One has an army made up of crystalline looking hover tanks, their buildings are living crystal, all new buildings and units are teleported, destroyed units are digitized away into data bits, and all voices are computers. The other race has human looking infantry called "commandos" with rifles, standard looking tanks and walking mechs, all buildings are delivered via fossil fuel burning dropships, and all voices are surly sounding humans. Wrong! The crystal computers are the humans! Wait...what? I swear to god they just screwed up and got the names switched around and no one ever noticed to fix it. It's hard to explain just how bad the base building UI is. The "alien" faction has a limited number of slots on each "pylon" they can build off of, but the buildings dwarf the pylons so they block any clear view for placement. The "human" faction is even worse because they have to worry about connecting everything with power lines and the power lines block other building placement. They also have to connect upgrade buildings to their factories (like the tech labs in Starcraft 2) so you have to plan the power lines around the future FOUR upgrade slots. Add on top of all this the fact that it's never clear which ground you can build on. Jesus christ the base building wasn't this ridiculous and cumbersome back in the original Warcraft. Nobody bothers playing the humans and their retarded Tetris mini-game, some try the aliens for variety, and eventually everyone just gives up and plays The Goo who don't have buildings (in addition to instant unit counters). Human turrets also need to be connected to power line to work. The power lines are much much more fragile than the turrets. Does anyone else see what's wrong with this picture? *shoots up Burger King* With the exception of the shimmering effect of The Goo blobs, the graphics look like something from 15 years ago. How the fuck is it that all RTS games still have inferior pyrotechnics to 2003's C&C Generals? This game should be a case study of taking a technically competent and polished game then making it as bland as possible. The menus, the icons, the voices, the unit designs, the readouts, everything seems like a bland placeholder until the art and sound teams were able to cook up something interesting. BLEH! |
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Grey Goo (Universe at War 2.0) by 10/17/2015, 9:10am PDT  I skipped the "Goo" part of the story entirely. by 10/17/2015, 9:58am PDT I skipped the whole story! NT by 10/17/2015, 2:23pm PDT An example by 10/17/2015, 7:44pm PDT |
