Playtime:
270 minutes
It's not often that a game comes along and tries to reinvent a genre. When it does eventually happen, most games crash and burn because they either overextend themselves or they find themselves in a niche so tight that they never gain any traction.
Any game that attempts to be a jack-of-all-trades reaches everyone but captures no one. Any game that attempts to master one single element finds a devoted cult following but sacrifices their wider audience.
Moduwar has found a sweet spot that it should grow and thrive in.
Gameplay: Moduwar seeks to redefine the RTS genre by conflating base-building and unit-producing elements; they're the same thing here.
While only playing the game could give you a practical view of how it operates, your 'Heart' organ acts as the "commander" of your game, making the base gamemode a regicide against the enemy player. To do this, you expand the area around your Heart with different buildings called 'Organs'. Once grown, these Organs can be sliced off the Heart and manoeuvred individually, allowing the player the ability mix-and-match to make a shockingly diverse array of DIY units.
The effect is a game in which counterplay and micromanagement is key. Knowing which Organs will give an advantage in combat versus particular setups of opposing units is necessary for more difficult games. Micromanagement becomes important as the direction that your units face can change how the combat escalates, and can genuinely become the difference between success and failure.
[Despite my experiments, I couldn't make a unit that did everything equally well. This is a very good thing.]
Overall, this unique system not only makes for a challenging and fresh RTS experience, but hopefully it is as modular as the eponymous creature, only creating more and more variety among games as it continues to evolve.
Sound: The music is an exception amongst RTS games in that I can actually remember the tracks that played because they aren't simple drums and horns. However, it doesn't override the concentration needed to cultivate a base. It's a good balance between hype and background, and the memorability is a nice bonus. The lack of variety is a shame, but what they have is good.
The unit sounds are competent, full of squish and hiss and gurgle. I certainly didn't notice anything sounding "off" or abnormal.
Graphics: The game focuses on readability over realism and detail. The unit organs for the most part are easily determined with a glance, allowing the player to quickly determine the capabilities of their enemy and assess damage on their own units.
The background terrain is surprisingly detailed and adds a lot to a game that would otherwise look a bit "flat" owing to the less-detailed units.
A personal nitpick is the similarity between the 'Lung' and 'Liver' organs, which look quite similar at a glance and has thrown me for a loop a few times now.
Performance: Unfortunately, I did run into a few hiccups in which my framerate dropped significantly when there was a more than a few units on screen. I don't know if it's just how Unity generates graphics, but the game definitely needs to improve in this area before launch. Running into issues with a 2-player game doesn't bode well for a 4-player experience.
FMV: This review wouldn't be complete without mentioning the FMV cutscenes and popups.
I never played a whole lot of earlier RTS games in which this was popular, in fact, I ended up skipping over that era of gaming almost entirely. When I did eventually come back and play C&C:Red Alert 3 [by many standards one of the greatest RTS's of all time], I thought that the FMV detracted from the experience.
I get it now.
Characters with more ham than a Modu could produce in an hour grace my screen and I'm here for every second of it. The campiness, the costuming and sets, I can tell that every person in these cutscenes is giving it their all. For me, it's a new and wonderful experience.
I truly hope that this game can get the audience it deserves. It may never become anything more than a small game with a cult following, but of all indie RTS games, I think this one should grow a large audience.
I leave you with my wishlist of things [which I have written without looking at a roadmap or dev updates]:
- More Organ variety: This is probably a given, but what the game currently has is a perfect foundation on which to build more.
- Refine the controls and pathfinding: I lump these together because it quickly becomes clear that there is a distinct link between these that does need addressing. It can be maddeningly imprecise and units will occasionally just.. disobey a direct order. From what I could gather, it seems that some Organs have a say over which range the unit engages in, and occasionally this will lead to a hokey-pokey with the enemy unit if your unit contains both Mortars and Mouths. I would love to see this receive attention.
- Server hosting through Steam: Currently the only option for multiplayer is to play on one of the five official [EU] servers, I would love the ability for players to host their own lobbies to allow for friends or strangers to connect. Especially in such a micro-intensive game, latency is going to be a core issue in multiplayer.
- Ambiguous Organ function: This is definitely a personal preference, but holy hell I need to say this. The fact that Organs have purposes and functions which aren't made clear in their tooltip is was so incredibly important to my enjoyment of the game. The experimental nature of finding out one of your units had a secret function because one of it's Organs did something unexpected was pure joy. Please continue in this fashion.
👍 : 5 |
😃 : 1