It's a StarCraft-based RTS game with pocket economy, face cams, zerg-peasants which turn into buildings. From Command & Conquer, it takes in-field pickups like resource crates and medkits. There are buildings to occupy with infantry. The rubber frame is selecting the entire army instead of being limited to packs. The original ideas is combining houses and the second resource into one building, and forcing territory spread by tracking the "heat" load on a square grid, giving big penalties to "heat"-dependant buildings in the overheated square.
The story is full of cool buzzword writing. So, Microslope was ordered to break up by court, so now Naver, Alibaba, and Yandex fight over their assets. You mine space unobtainium and space crypto, the campaign even tracks the story stonks.
The campaign is 12-missions long and is fun enough, with a couple of cool gimmicky maps.
Despite the maps having resource crates the strategy is closer to Dune 2. Wait and defend while accumulating an army and then attack. But since defence towers are literally useless and even peasants destroy them, and they demand nouncraft costs investment and have to be spread out due to generating heat, you need to defend with the units which will become the attacking force. Instead of useless towers it's better to invest into multiple repair stations. Which have AoE repair for a price, but also send projectiles, so the farther away your army from your base the longer will you wait for a repair.
The units have very low TTK and take long time to be produced even with several factories working in parallel. Which isn't helped by the super dummy unit AI. Being made on the Rum and Gun engine, the game already offers wonky pathfinding and collisions. The building exits are blockable so if you don't plan good you basically just lost your investment. There's no visible walkability grid when you place the buildings. The units have no stances, and they are easily baitable by AI units to go walk away from your base to the other side of the map.
The ending is okay. But you can consider it a cliffhanger. You finish your own current contract, but it reveals new information about future events of this world. Which probably will not be continued.
The game comes with very low-res blurry menus. Despite being recent it really looks 20-30 years older just because of the GUI. And then the GUI is not scalable. It's already too big on FHD, but if you use 4 by 3 it will also start overlapping. There's no back button or hotkey for the menus. No credits button in the menu. This game being such a small scale production people suspicious it was done using AI. But the developer says these all are voices of freelancers, and there's a list of actors in the credits. (I already uploaded the credits section.) You can have as many save files as you want, and the games shows Windows window to manage them. But the load menu only shows the first ten files ordered by the file name. Steam overlay doesn't work.
There's no graphics options and you cannot disable blur, bloom, vignetting, chromatic aberration and whatever else instagram slop filtres the game uses despite being on an in-house engine instead of unreal slop. The overall picture is so blurry and fuzzy it really ages the game immensely. Instead of looking modern hi-res and crisp it looks like something from early 00s released on PS2 which couldn't even run games above 240i in the age of 1280x1024. The FoV is a bit low and there's no way to increase it.
There's a ton of minor bugs. Playing the campaign on easy it is not that bad. But even going for the achievements on easy it starts to really grate on the nerves. Like, the rubber frame has about 10% chance of literally not working and doing nothing. Giving an RMB command to a unit will not work several times in a row, and then when it works it will send the unit to the previously clicked location you send other units to, despite you already clicking ten times in this place. The units ignore orders, especially focusing the attack. And that in itself is really hard to perform because of the hitboxes. The game really doesn't understand attack orders and want to issue walk into the enemy pile order instead. The feedback on click is not clear. Attack confirmation and walk confirmation look borderline the same. When attack-moving units don't want to attack buildings. And this is not CnC, you don't have engineers to steal half the enemy base. Units have XP gauge, but that virtually does nothing. Especially not with such low TTK. No one comes out of here alive.
The basic unit's tooltip says it has the cryptojack ability. It does not. Only some grenades. And then you can buy multiples of the same upgrade for the multiplied price, but receive only one upgrade. Effectively the game has a bug button to destroy your own resources. One of the achievements is bugged. The hard difficulty was added later, so the achievement trigger moved to it, but the description of the achievement was not fixed to represent the new reality.
The game has cool music, cool writing, cool design, cool art, pretty cool voice acting. But what people call "UX" is way unfinished.
https://youtu.be/rD8doiIZLks
The game really needs a polishing pass. Otherwise it is a new RTS, with several fresh ideas, it has a single-player focus, cool setting, doesn't overstay its welcome, and especially for that super low price. It could've been so much better.
https://youtu.be/xIAfCupuZ3w
