Perhaps the finest work in the RTS genre

Posted on 2010-08-17 06:51:38 by zebber:

Total Annihilation is a game that bucked a lot of trends in the RTS genre, and came away far far better for doing it. Let's break it down:
The soundtrack is an excellent place to start, as it will be among the first parts of the game you experience. Simply put, this is some of Jeremy Soule's finest work. Search around for the game's intro on the streaming video site of your read more choice, and enjoy. Even better, the soundtrack is used dynamically in-game, switching to more energetic tracks when battles swing into high gear and mellowing when things are calm.
But how about gameplay mechanics? This is among the first games that found the older "resources and the peons/workers/units that harvest them" mechanic tiresome. You do not build drones or engineers and sic them on a pile of slowly decreasing resources. Instead, you set up structures that gather or produce resources at certain rates. The idea is that the structure will not run out of the resource, it just collects it at a certain speed. For people who have only ever sent harvesters out to collect, this might seem dangerously unbalanced, but I assure you it isn't. You might have infinite resources to collect, but you're gathering them at a slow, automatic rate. There's also a number of ways to gather resources. For energy, you can build solar collectors, or if water is available, tidal generators, or fusion plants can be built. For metal, there are different sized mining structures, and an interesting set of buildings that make metal from extremely large amounts of energy. And of course you can scavenge both from the battlefield, if things are especially tight.
For unit behaviors, you have several options readily available in the hud, dictating how aggressive or indifferent to enemies they are, allowing you to avoid the issue of a patrol that foolishly chases an enemy all the way back to their base. Also, when units fire and attack, they use different arcs and trajectories for their shots. Some units fire in high arcs, able to go over hills and obstacles, while others fire in straight lines. Nearly every unit can miss when it fires, as well, which adds a welcome bit of realism. In addition, there's often a real sense of scope to unit ranges. This isn't a game that has artillery that fires a third of the way across your screen; you'll be firing that stuff across the map.
There are a number of different maps available: worlds made entirely of metal, or fully submerged water worlds. Island maps or dense jungles. Fights among toxic explosive plants. All different maps, and many requiring a fully different set of tactics and units.
Bringing me to perhaps the biggest positive, the units themselves. Speaking plainly, there's a crap load. The Core Contingency expansion adds even more. Fully fleshed out navies (not just one or two ship types), a host of infantry mechs and vehicles, radar jammers, amphibious units ("are those tanks coming out of the water?!), aircraft, hovercraft, and a collection of advanced structures that really add flavor. And the developers, in a very unique idea that I have yet to see replicated in modern games, made it relatively easy to add custom units made by users freely to the game. While some games were allowing the creation of maps, this game did that and more. Users can create their own models and behaviors for units and add them into the game. Search around, and you will find enormous quantities of units and packs of units if you're a fan of customizing your game.
To be fair, if the game had a weak spot, it would be story. The story is fairly simple, and acts mostly as an excuse to blow things to bits. You won't be seeing a cutscene every mission. Briefings are simply delivered, with a small bit of flavor text, an objective, a little narration, and then you go. There are no hero units (other than your nameless Commander unit) to rally around. I usually miss heavy story elements in games, but this game delivers heavily enough on the gameplay side of things you'll be hard-pressed to notice.
In the end, this is a great example of what the RTS genre needed, rather than pumping out clones of other games with slightly different skins.