Original War
Brilliant game! Really well done RTS with RPG elements, with similarities to the Jagged Alliance or Commandos series. It felt a little slow paced and odd initially, but it quickly grew on me.
Instead of “building” infantry units in barracks like most other RTS games you have to work with the units you have. You’re always outnumbered, and to make up for it you must focus on resource management (gathering crates and building oil and siberite refineries), research and upgrades, and of course you have to plan your attacks so that you don’t lose units. It makes the game more exciting, involving and harder, and for people like me it adds a ton of replay value, since I wanted to beat the game with no characters losses. They won’t “resurrect”, so if you lose an important character you will miss out of dialogue, and you have to pick a weaker generic character and train it.
– Real player with 148.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Sci-fi Games.
One of the most fun and conceptually interesting RTS games I’ve ever played. It’s an Original War in more than name.
The Good Things:
Good mix of RTS and RPG mechanics. Humans are a limited resource, they do not respawn and you do not receive more than you start with. Each character can gain experience in 4 classes and can change between classes at any time in the appropriate building, retaining his experience. Some things (construction, vehicles, turrets) can be automated, removing the need for a human pilot, but computer-controlled entities are slower, shabbier and do a lot less damage than those controlled by a skilled human operator. You must always find a balance between risking irrepleaceable human staff and wasting resources on suboptimal AI control.
– Real player with 139.2 hrs in game
Ceres
Update: How many hours? How long can you go before you do the Ceres event in game? Once you have this game figured out you can get quite OP (not by cheating!). Which you need in some places. It really is epic. Yes, I have played 500+ hours. There have been some frustrating stretches where I should have gotten a save in, and decided/had to go back. It can fight you it’s true. Like everything in this game, you must learn the rules the hard way, lol.
Maybe I’ll make a guide on managing the saving at least (just leave the zone), and drone wrangling (fly the ship towards the drone while recalling it, and other stuff), and other things like that.
– Real player with 734.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Space Games.
From what I could experience in the first 10 hours of game play its clear this title has a lot of potential. The graphics are good without being too demanding so heavy fighting hardly slows down at all, making for some seriously nasty battles. It feels balanced and the ship modification adds a real personal feel to what I do and how I play the game. The only time I failed at a mission so far was due to the tricky nature of disabling a ship without destroying it, as you need lasers or boarding drones which turned into a bit of a game of hide in the bigger ship’s blind spots. The learning curve can be a little hard but if you played and loved games like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Freelancer & Independence War, then this game is right up those lines.
– Real player with 97.5 hrs in game