A Grand Idea, Horribly Wasted
Download Size: 4.5 GB
Time Played: 90 min.
Players Online (Sunday evening after release): 8
What I'd Pay: $5
Steam Price (4/1/12): $10
I'd like a wargame set in a alternate steampunk Civil War, but not one this half-baked. Between the janky online play, the stiff (sometimes unworkable) controls, and the vague instructions, it's a struggle to find the fun in this game.
The game has a Battlefield setup: first side to run out of tickets loses. You can drain tickets from the enemy by holding control points, but you lose tickets if your men die. Instead of each player controlling just 1 infantry, they can choose between infantry, cavalry, cannons, tanks, and ships, jumping from one to another as they wish. They control like a simplified FPS: WASD to move, left-click to fire, right-click to aim. There's no jumping (except to clamor over fences) and no weapon switching (yet). The meat of the game is in the Army Skirmish mode, where you build your own army and send it out onto the battlefield, controlling it like an RTS.
Unfortunately, both modes feel broken. The FPS controls feel clunky (the wooden animation doesn't help), while the RTS controls are unexplained and sometimes don't work for vague reasons. While I was trying to play Army Skirmish online, most of my units refused to Target Ground or enter Aggressive Stance. It was a crap shoot to get them to attack a unit. Was it working as intended, or was it a bug? I couldn't tell.
Some of the unit mechanics also feel wrong or imbalanced. Take the airship, for example: the most expensive unit in the game, yet easily taken down by tanks, artillery, and machine guns from anywhere on the map. That's because most of those units have their shells fly in a straight line, gravity be damned. The 2060 artillery is actually better at taking down airships than other ground units; its shells fly in a straight line, and it can't aim low enough to hit the ground on flat land. The RTS fog of war deserves special notice: you can actually see much farther in FPS mode than you see in RTS view, and the RTS view doesn't clearly mark enemy troops; your men can walk right past their men and you'd never know.
The maps aren't much to write home about, either. I'm not sure if the real-life battlefields they're based on were actually this sparse and barren, but most of the fighting happens in slightly hilly fields split up by stone walls, wooden fences, and some trees. There's few buildings, no roads, and aside from the map's weather, they look too similar for my tastes.
This feels like an unfinished game, and perhaps with enough patches, it would be interesting & fun. Unfortunately, I don't think its community will last that long: it's barely been a week and already the number of people online during a Sunday evening are in the single-digits.
