a lot of interesting ideas, but poorly balanced, and performance even on 2020 beef pc significantly fluctuates between fps drops and even game/clock/tick lag in a singleplayer 2v2 skirmish when all players are close to pop cap. It was a rough experience. I hate to put a negative review, but I can't in clear conscience recommend this RTS when much more enjoyable, fair and fun games exist, released both before and after it.
About ideas: I really like the idea of drastically different factions, Starcraft was great in this regard, but grey goo's factions are just so much more inventive. Like you can build basically anywhere with Betas, given you build off of hubs and in vision; Humans have overcomplicated conduit domino bases; Goo has no bases whatsoever and can flow everywhere. But inventiveness is limited only to base building, when it comes to units, they aren't all that different between factions. And as cool as these ideas look on paper, Betas are a nuisance to play against (especially AI) because they will just fly in, drop a hub and fly away. Humans towers are OP AF, especially because they can teleport. And Goo aren't all that strong in the big picture of balance. And on top of that, units are slow and weak, and buildings are tanky. and if humans have 3-step heating up siedge laser units, betas have hard hitting siedge artillery, goo just lazily throws snot at building, with about the same impact. When I discovered goo's Bastion unit, I thought "oh, is this big boy an ultralisk kind of unit?" no, It's just an unarmed dumb*** who draws aggro.
Btw, mission status and goals are for some reason clickable and interfere with unit selection/orders.
Btw2, when playing ultrawide, the bottom console is scaled up to fill basically the entire bottom half of the screen. Turns out to be a problem when controlling Beta's epic unit who can build other units. I didn't bother lowering resolution, so that might not be such an issue if you have 16:9, but it made me think, maybe bottom console should've stayed in 2001 Starcraft1, and a sidebar should be the standard instead for non-4:3 screens.
Campaign... is either shockingly stupidly designed (the first Human mission is on hidden timer, when you're trying to figure out a build order and how to even build these conduits and factories) or utterly boring (the Goo act is the worst offender here, its a g****mn slog to go through). First Goo mission is a stealth optional mission, and I couldn't reach tanky AF destructible debris from obvious highground and had to just storm head on. The last mission had the worst objective I've seen, hold 3 structures with Mother blobs simultaneously for 5 minutes against enemies basically spawning on top of your units (if any Mother blob is killed in process, timer resets back to 5 minutes), then leave completely unhindered. And if that sounds subjective, keep in mind only 9.8% players completed base campaign on any difficulty. This is a rare glowing achievement.
The DLC continues this trend. the first map gives you a special unit, Singleton. Oh cool, I thought, a hero mission, that's a first one in GG. Turns out, Singleton is a melee unit. o... kay? The mission is against Goo (who slow and absorb enemies in melee). Wait, hol up. The mission is ESCORT this one unit through a spiral to the middle. Ok, it's not that hard but it's a terrible idea. And remember I said units are slow and weak? Well Singleton is basically useless in these conditions, his only saving quaility is that he has a good hp pool.
DLC mission 2 is Goo stealth again (limited units, find more units in specific places), this time stealth mandatory, against hidden timer again (roaming enemy patrols find those specific places and destroy them), and final stretch is just either storm the walls with mounted units, or try to slip around enemy base. both of these spell doom for your insignificant unit numbers, and then there's another wall that you need to destroy. It was at this moment when I was just done, it was alt+f4 uninstall for me, can't be bothered.
DLC faction seemed strong, at first glance. Good mobility, buildings can be empowered by "pylons" that turn into turrets. Epic unit looks fun.
One thing I can't deny, Frank Klepacki made some good music again. Swear to god, this man never missed.
