Rush, Boom, Turtle: Everybody Look What's Goin' Down

The recent quiet revolution in real-time strategy games
11/13/2008 8:09 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 5

The ships upgrade in attack, defense or speed. Do you level evenly, or do you focus on one trait? What's more, there are neutral merchant ships on the maps that drop one-shot power-ups, so you can never be sure exactly how a battle will progress.

If you have any doubt that this constitutes an RTS because you only control a single unit, I invite you to look up Herzog Zwei, the great-great-granddaddy of all RTSes, and a console game, to boot. The lesson relearned in Age of Booty is that an RTS doesn't have to be busy. It's a simple game with a great deal of flexibility, especially with a group of human players (four-player split-screen!).

And although it's easy to write this off as a multiplayer-only game, that's not quite accurate. You can stock it with any combination of bots you like. The game even has a rudimentary campaign mode that arranges scenarios by difficultly and ticks them off the list as you complete them.

Will there be other games like Age of Booty? You bet. A platform like Xbox Live Arcade is ideal for this sort of thing. In fact, I can imagine this sort of design spilling over into casual games. Will they appeal to traditional RTS players? Probably not. The average RTS player will likely turn his nose up at such a simple but compelling design.

Darwinia squared

Consider Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest.

There is only one type of unit: the Multiwinian. Your task as a player is to direct the Multiwinians to wherever they need to go. The location varies by game type. Some games have multiple victory locations, some are capture-the-flag, and some have tricky requirements about fueling rockets. But the basic tactics are a matter of where you send your Multiwinians. There's also a rather basic secondary consideration in terms of leaders, who you can use as waypoints or formations. Waypoints automatically direct your stream of Multiwinians, not unlike a plumbing system. Formations move more slowly, but they pack a harder punch because the Multiwinians are more densely packed (and incidentally more vulnerable to explosions).

And that's it.

Well, okay, almost. Multiwinia is broken wide open by crates that drift down from the sky, each containing some potentially game-breaking power-up if you divert Multiwinians to unpack them. This is where the real gameplay is, because otherwise, directing streams of competing Multiwinians at each other is like two people fighting each other with a garden hose to see who can get the other guy wettest. Fun, sure, but kind of brainless.

So a typical game relies on the random element of which power-ups appear and how they're used. It's equal parts luck, reflexes and tactics. And if you've ever played a game by Introversion, the creators of the lovely and haunting Defcon, you know you're in for some of the most muscular and economic graphics you've ever seen. For a 50 MB hard drive footprint (yep, you read that right), Multiwinia has no business looking and sounding this good.

The lesson here is that an RTS doesn't need a lot of unit types. Variety and flexibility can come from someplace other than a bunch of different moving parts. This is one of the purest action RTSes you will ever play with its single unit and lack of tactical fiddling (this is partly a lie, since power-users will learn things like flanking and tank assaults). For such a simple and relatively hands-off game, Multiwinia is tense and frenetic. I suspect it'll be a good fit for Xbox Live next month.