Perimeter

This game started with a couple of great ideas. An RTS generally consists of three broad classes of ingredients: resources, which the players use to build and/or fuel their armies; terrain, on which the players fight; and the units making up the armies themselves. Perimeter toys with that recipe in a compelling way, blurring the lines between those three classes. The terrain itself is a resource; units can affect it; those effects can damage your opponent's units. New and interesting tactical and strategic options open up by virtue of the variety of possible terrain modifications available, to say nothing of the dizzying array of units. The control system consists of causing groups of base units 'morph' into whatever combat unit is needed; the number of independently-controllable groups is small, only one to start with, and must be built out. It takes some getting used to, but it's a really interesting way to do things. Unfortunately, it's difficult to really immerse yourself in this game. The ideas that make it great are let down by an at-best-mediocre implementation. The menu and intro briefing graphics are downright ugly. The in-game rendering is easy on the eyes and actually quite beautiful, but the bland unit and structure models are frustratingly difficult to tell apart. Pathfinding is quite possibly the worst in the genre. Gameplay is uniformly slow, which makes it genuinely hard to feel any excitement at all. However, all of these complaints are forgivable for a good enough game, and Perimeter should be that good. But then there's the music. This game's music is nothing short of disastrous. Listening to it for too long gives even the most good-natured and forgiving player a strong desire to go away strangle something warm and furry. It is brain-destroyingly pain-invokingly boring, that most unpleasant kind of boring that means it just drills into your mind with a dull throb until you just can't take it anymore. And practically atonal besides. I wish Perimeter were better. The ideas are amazing, and make for a completely different mode of tactical thought. But the presentation of those ideas is just good enough to elicit fairly high expectations, yet quite poor enough to horribly disappoint the same. Truly sad.

Its controls are outdated and flawed but they work and are easy to understand once your done with the few tutorial missions. The units are mostly shit until you figure out what they are good for, but even then building them is needlessly stupid yet it still works out somehow, controlling them can be difficult because they are suicidal and will walk off cliffs without warning. They can be both incredibly smart and very stupid, sometimes they auto dodge the enemy and sometimes they dodge into each other and get killed needlessly. You have a energy grid that both gathers your own resource (I think?) and acts as a power grid to keep all your other buildings functioning, this same building/grid also functions as a super shield you can toggle on/off at will. Turning on your shield while certain enemy buildings are within its range can have the effect of capturing those buildings. On some levels this is a tactic that has to be mastered if you want to win. Maps/levels in this game can be very frustrating until you finally see the weak point, expect many restarts. But this is part of the fun actually, maps can't be won by simply doing the same thing over and over. Its story is strange and very sci-fi-y, don't expect it to make much real sense, but it is fun to see how thing will unfold. It is also told by changing perspective after every mission or two, plus there is a year counter that shows the progression of time, plus the world in this game is a large column of floaty bubbles with springy bands between them; all of this serves to make following whats going on a bit convoluted. Still, its very basic and you'll have a general idea of what's happening. I would still recommended this game though despite everything. I'm certainly having fun with it. I would love to see this game get a make over that would smooth out all the unnecessary clunky bullshit.

NOT RECOMMENDED. It is basically the Creeper World flash game in 3D with much, much worse (cumbersome) game design and a lack of consistency or balance. In summary, the game is a bunch of tests masked as missions and a lot of work in exchange for close-to-zero fun factor. In other words, it gets old super fast. Don't buy this game. It looks fine the first couple of levels, then it starts throwing very cheap man-breaker tests at you out-of-the-blue. The game also crashes at times and even the pre or post mission menu narration bug out as if it fails to load the next piece of dialogue. Once you reach the level Biodamage, the game falls apart. You are presented with almost every single lazy dev trick in the book: limited time, a horde of digger units you cannot properly defend against because the specialized defense turret is bugged and refuses to fire at them, completely useless mission briefing etc. Oh yeah and the digger units counter the titular perimeter shield, which according to the manual is supposed to be the "absolute defense." The game F's with you hardcore and playing it on "easy" does not change that. "a very advanced terraforming engine." Translation: you get to wait a long-ass time for the mandatory terraforming to complete before you can slap down a building. Waiting that is a big chunk of the playtime, during which there is not much else to do. The lack of complementary game content and mechanics shows. "an impressive number of units" Ha - a good one! You are extremely limited in how many units you can get. Usually there is only one unit that fits a purpose (sometimes there is nothing, e.g. reliable defense against diggers). You have to build a command center for each extra squad slot and you cannot go over ~25 units / squad. Training the units is super slow and busywork-intensive. "A unique and compelling story" It's generic as hell. Bad human thoughts becoming planet-conquering bugs. A lame excuse for fighting bugs and player clones.

The star of the show is not your units, but your humble energy generators that combine resource gathering/base expansion/invincible shield generation/structure capture. How you manage your generators and take down enemy generators make or break many campaign missions. The downside is that skirmishes where you do not have to use generators in a high risk/high reward way lose some of the game's charm. Fortunately, there are other cool, unusual ideas. You do not control individual units, instead up to five combat groups made up of three types of basic units: "soldiers," "officers," and "engineers." You can add or delete basic units from the group at will. At any time, each combat group can morph into one type of advanced unit. Each advanced unit requires a number of basic units. One laser cannon requires three soldiers. One rocket launcher requires three officers. An attack chopper requires two of each. There are many more. "Well, that's just wasteful," you say, "When I morph from three choppers to two cannons, I waste six officers!" True, but if you had a force for 50 laser cannons, an additional two officers will allow you to morph the group into one chopper, and now you can cross impassable terrain. The other 148 soldiers are stored, if you will, in the group. If you lose that chopper, though, you lose the whole group. Realistic? No. But tactically rich. A brilliant idea. You also get subterranean units that can tunnel beneath the invincible shields from the generators. They do not damage enemies in the traditional way. Instead, they leave a path of raised terrain that damages buildings above it over time. Oh, and when terrain is disrupted, you can't build on it until you smooth it out. This game is very new player friendly. The first ten missions or so teach you different mechanics. If you are significantly challenged in one, you missed the lesson. Don't hesitate to watch a YouTube video. Both Eldruid and Biodamage are teaching missions. Go try it!

This game has a decent campaign, but i was disappointed by the lack of depth on the research aspect. You have research buildings, but you don't really control beyond that. You have armies that are annoying to create, but beyond that are easy to use and command. You do get to build what you want, and you have to manage your power usage. The management aspect is challenging and fun. The biggest problem with this game is that it is really difficult to get running on Windows 7. i had to reinstall with administrator and Windows XP Service Pack 2, and i had to do this each time just to get past the black screen that it wants to start as.