Early Access first impressions were plagued by a lack of unit control (no formations, weird paths, awkward aiming). Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed. It was very disappointing to see that playing the campaign, recognizing it early on and getting into the skirmishes that followed, felt the same as it did almost nine months ago. We’ve seen a sort of deck building system where factions have more units than they can bring into a match, so you have to choose which units you want to use. This led me to utilize odd strategies to fight enemies in certain builds, and I found myself unable to counter certain enemy strategies if I brought the wrong units.
As mentioned earlier, the transition from an objective-based unit combat storyline to a full-blown base-building and army-building game is abrupt and uncomfortable. Players new to the genre may have a hard time understanding the system, and will most likely need hotkeys to even have a chance at winning online. You can find a little fun if you know how.
There are also significant differences in playstyles and utilization between factions. Global Reach has a standard “Western”-like army with rifles, bazookas, tanks, artillery and aircraft. Blacklists are more stealth-based, allowing you to hide units, sabotage enemy abilities, and attack fast-moving jeeps, other vehicles, and aircraft. The final faction, New Horizons, is his one of the most interesting with futuristic mechs, laser weapons, and basically lightsabers. These asymmetric factions are fun, but I regularly found myself losing because of the different units.
Again, it may look like I hate games, but I did are you OKNothing groundbreaking or scary. I had some issues with some gameplay activities, but it was still fun to play. As someone who tends to play many different styles of RTS games, I couldn’t help but want other features to make the game feel more modern. As I said earlier with the issues of passing, targeting and formations, this feels like a classic RTS. Whether that’s good or bad is up to the player, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as other RTS games in 2022.
