This is a neat little RTS by Petroglyph, which was founded in large part by former Westwood employees - the company that popularized the RTS genre as we know it. It's fast paced, easy to learn and sticks close to the original Command and Conquer formula, focused heavily in base building and were all your construction options are listed in a sidebar. The game only has one faction, which I suppose could be a turn-off for some. I don't mind it, even think the three faction model popularized by StarCraft became too much of a trope in itself, but I guess my personal sweetspot is C&C's and Total Annihilation's two faction model. There's a tech tree for your buildings and units, which like in the old C&C games is based on pre-requisites rather than upgrades (as Blizzard's games tended to handle it) - which for example means you have to have built barracks in order to build the vehicle factory, and in order to get the more advanced vehicles you also need to construct a radar station. The game also features music by the legendary Frank Klepacki and doens't disappoint. Oh, let's get to some aspects I wasn't a huge fan of. I wish there were cutscenss, and there's of course the odd title, "8-bit Armies", despite there being nothing particularly 8-bit inspired by this. The music is in Klepacki's "rocktronica" style, the art is cublistic á la Minecraft and there are some retro game memes thrown into the UI, but nothing stands out as much of an homage to the 8-bit era of games. The art style in particular gets the job done, and it is easy to tell different unit types etc. apart, but is a far cry from Westwood's voxel masterpieces Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 or for that matter the 16-bit classic Dune II. I would've appreciated 1992 style sprites over what we got here, but the generic art is easy to look past. This is a fun RTS I'd recommend to anybody who enjoyed the C&C and Dune style games of the mid 90's, and the launch price point is pretty much perfect for what the game is.
Blair Zuppicich, the composer for 7th Legion and most other Vision Software titles is an unsung master of video game music. Sadly, his works always tend to end up in rather flawed games, and 7th Legion is no exception. The game's premise is great, though a bit too heavily influenced by Warhammer 40000, it also has some pretty interesting mechanics, most importantly a card game system, which it probably was the first RTS games to have, even though we've seen it more recently (and better executed) in games like Dragon Commander and Battleforge. 7th Legion sadly has issues with many of the genre's fundamental mechanics - path finding and mouse interface among the worst offenders, but all in all it's a pretty interesting title from the era when we saw the creative peak of the genre, and for the price on GOG, I think it's worth experiencing.
