Meridian: New World does a lot of things well, but does just as many wrong. I still recommend it if you know its flaws going in and can live with them. Gameplay Good: Basic interface is intuitive and works well. Solid, well balanced RTS mechanics. Campaign has good variety in missions and good difficulty progression, with the exception of the last mission. Bad: Two races that mostly mirror each other stopped being interesting in RTS a long time ago, and Meridian has only one race. Last mission is brutally hard - it took me longer to clear it than the rest of the game combined. Lacking a number of interface niceties you'd expect from a modern RTS like multi-building selection, moving units out of the way of building placement, and things like that. No multiplayer, only campaign and skirmish vs AI. Now I don't personally want to go multiplayer with this game, but it is a standard feature that people expect from an RTS. Graphics & Sound Good: Terrain and models all look nice. Animations in-game are all smooth, though in cutscenes are a bit stiff. The music is great, mostly solid rock music with a bit of spacey-type music. Sound effects are all serviceable, being mostly guns, lasers, and explosions. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the voice acting, but at least none of it stood out as especially bad so that's a good thing. Bad: I don't really have anything bad to say here. If anything I'd say that there isn't enough variety in the unit models, but that stems from the game only having a single race in it. Miscellaneous * Story is pretty run-of-the-mill sci-fi. Earth is overpopulated, you go to establish a colony on a different planet, and bad things happen. * I ran into two crashes during my playthrough. The first was when a particular cutscene tried to play (I believe the one between missions 10 & 11) which was caused by my computer being set to Japanese locale. The second was a random out of bounds array crash that didn't reoccur.
So far I'm quite enjoying my time with Symphony. Visually it is very eye-catching, and it looks great. Sound, well, you make your own soundtrack! How cool is that? Apparently the idea has been done before, but I hadn't heard of those games before. Gameplay can get pretty frenetic, depending on difficulty and the song. As for downsides, there are a few. It can get hard to see when there's a lot going on. A few of the weapons are subpar, sometimes almost useless. Music navigation is fairly poor for large collections. And all the flashing neon lights WILL give you a headache. Make sure to take regular breaks to rest your eyes and you're in for a fun, but not perfect, ride.
I played WBC3 quite some time ago, so I was interested in seeing what the predecessors were like. First some positives. There's a lot of different factions that all play differently, no mirror factions here. As such there are many different units, as well as many different Hero classes. The Hero progression of the series is one of the better implementations I've seen in an RTS, and the Retinue idea is pretty great as well. The major downside for me is that you can only play the campaign as Human to start. You get a bit of time with other races depending on which path you take, but much less time spent than humans. The gameplay is also pretty slow relative to other RTS games, I find myself getting bored slowly building up before really doing anything. Other things of note - while WBC is mostly stable, I have hit a couple crashes and a couple graphical glitches where the game screen goes black for a few seconds. Also, this might be just because I'm kind of bad with Humans, but this is possibly the most difficult campaign I've played. This game on Easy is at least as difficult as most of SC2 on Brutal.
Visually the game is pretty good for its time, though that obviously was long ago. The biggest problem here is that all the units pretty much look the same. Even the Commander looks just like any other infantry bot. The sound is great. There's an amazing soundtrack here that's worth listening to on its own if you like orchestral stuff. As far as sound effects, they're clear and appropriate. No complaints here. There's a lot of good gameplay ideas here. The resource gathering is interesting. I wasn't a fan of the super-low cap on stored resources, but otherwise I liked the system. The Commander is also a good idea. Like a Command Center, worker, and big tank all in one. Having units that shoot while moving is also a nice touch. Not every RTS needs to do these things, but there's a lot to learn here. Lastly, the UI. This is the one big reason why, despite everything, I just couldn't like TA. The most basic of basics works fine - click on stuff. Beyond that is a mess. I'd go into more detail, but this review is too long. Suffice it to say, the UI is hard to work with and tells you almost nothing. Overall Total Annihilation is a game with some great ideas heavily marred by one of the worst UI's I've ever seen.
