Rush, Boom, Turtle: Waiting for StarCraft II

Seven new games to play while you're waiting for the next big RTS
7/29/2009 5:07 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Believe me, I know it's tough. It's been a great spring and summer for every genre but ours. We aren't even getting expansion packs, unless you count those chintzy overpriced maps for Halo Wars. In fact, here's a sobering thought: The last real real-time strategy game was Stormrise. Can you believe it? Can you believe Stormrise came out a mere few months ago? That game tanked so hard it feels like it came out last year.

But don't despair. I bring good news. You may not know this, but there are some new games that will satisfy your RTS jones. All of them are currently available. Some of them -- actually, all but one of them -- aren't even technically RTSes. But they'll do until one comes along. Think of these as the seven games that will tide you over for the time being. Think of them as stealth RTSes.


Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This?

You might have written off this game as some weird inscrutable dungeon-building sim that you can only play on the PSP and that doesn't have very fancy graphics. If that. It's more likely you wrote off this game as something with the sort of weird title that indicates it's strange and Japanese. All of which is true.

But what you may not know is that this is a game all about unit management. You don't build units, and you don't control them directly. You don't even really position them. They do their own thing, and a lot of the time, it isn't the thing you wish they were doing. But you're nevertheless in charge of managing them.

Your job is to create conditions in which certain creatures thrive. This is a delicate ecological balance where creatures need to eat each other, and you manage the elements. Carve out the area through which hungry, dying, egg-laying, decomposing beasts move. Hope for the best when heroes come calling to plunder your dungeon. There's even a fantasy version of composting in this strange little game.

As far as relating it to real-time strategy games, here's what I've got: It most reminds me of Majesty, the classic hands-off RTS from 2000. I still haven't quite wrapped my head around Holy Invasion, but I know that it feels like playing some funky RTS on my PSP.

ArmA II

Among the many ways to play this grand, messy shooter simulation is a real-time strategy mode. It plays out across multiple towns stocked with neutral defenders. As you capture towns by killing the defenders, trucks drive back and forth between the town and your base. Each time a truck arrives, your team earns a little money. The leader on your team -- appointed by vote -- spends the money on base defenses and factories. This determines what each individual can buy with his money, which includes teammates, better weapons, vehicles and even helicopters. Eventually, you're going to start fighting the other team for control of towns. The ultimate objective is to wipe out the other team's base.

You can play this mode single-player with a bunch of retarded bots on either side. If you vote yourself leader -- the bots will always acquiesce to your political ambitions -- you can order them around from the map screen, which feels like playing an RTS without graphics. This mode is clearly intended to be played multiplayer, although it's going to be a long haul and I seriously doubt it works very well. In other words, it's perfectly representative of the ArmA II experience!

Comet Crash

I talked about this PlayStation 3 downloadable title in my column on tower defense games. As a single-player game, it's pretty conventional. But I bring it up here specifically for the multiplayer, which is unique among tower defense games. Multiplayer matches can only be played locally, with up to four players on the same screen (you do have four PlayStation 3 controllers, right?). Each player gets a flying ship that doubles as his cursor. The ship is used to drop defensive towers and unit factories, and to upgrade them to their more powerful forms. It's also used to collect resources from the rocks that drift in from off-screen.

As a match progresses, each player divides his resources between defensive buildings and factories that slowly accumulate armies. At any point, a player can let loose with a stream of attackers from his factories. If the attackers make it all the way to the other player's base, they enter it and do a certain amount of damage. The trick is to watch what the other guy is building and to amass your forces accordingly. There's no fog of war, and units will move along the shortest path to the enemy base (a path that is largely determined by how the other player has built his defenses). But it's very much like playing a short, streamlined RTS.