Adam Wolf

IGN

Rip the Earth a new one with one of the most malleable RTS games to date.
by Dave 'Fargo' Kosak

August 14, 2006 - The real-time strategy genre has always been a bedrock of PC gaming, home to some of the biggest and best-selling franchises. But while developers have made significant advances in graphics (as evidenced by Age of Empires III or screens and video from the upcoming Command & Conquer 3), not a lot of companies have experimented with radical new approaches to gameplay. One happy exception has been KDV Games, the Russian development team behind Perimeter. That 2004 landmark strategy game tasked you with reshaping the map as you plowed through levels using a variety of terraforming weapons and tools.

Maelstrom marks the company's next effort based on the same game engine, and IGN has been following it closely since it was announced (see our hands-on from back in June for more about the technology and backstory). Recently we got some more play time with the game thanks to the single-player demo, which will be released this Tuesday on FilePlanet.

While some of the huge map-altering technologies aren't available in the demo, there's enough there to give players a good feel for the various factions and how they play. First up is the Ascension -- a ruthless, fanatical, corporate organization with access to humanity's best technology. Just about everything the Ascension throws onto the battlefield can transform into something else. Vehicles can become static gun emplacements, for instance. More importantly, your bases can pack up on wheels and drive off to relocate.


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While the technology behind the Ascension is cool, their strategies are pretty straightforward. Not so with the Hai-Genti, the alien race also playable in the demo. Rather than producing units in factories, new units are hatched out of eggs that players call from the sky. Eggs are relatively inexpensive, which means you can stack up piles of them in your bases, ready to hatch at a moment's notice if you're suddenly attacked. The aliens also collect "biomass," a polite way of saying that unfortunate humans can be regurgitated into alien spawn that can in turn be fed to your eggs to make creatures you hatch from them stronger. Play to the end of the Hai-Genti levels and you'll get access to medium-sized eggs, capable of hatching four-armed alien spawn that can literally tear humans limb-from-limb.

Everything in a Maelstrom level is completely destructible and deformable. It won't be long before you discover that those ruined cities that dot the landscape can be leveled and crunched underfoot. Cement pillars -- the remnants of a shattered highway system -- can be knocked over like dominoes. Broken cars and trucks can be tossed aside like toys.

Unfortunately, the really big weapons capable of completely reshaping a map aren't available in the demo, but that doesn't mean you won't be able to play with some cool toys. The Alien leader, Mammon, can summon whirlwind tornadoes at will -- these suckers are great for taking out infantry or throwing aside piles of debris.

Maelstrom is still a work in progress (as the intro screen to the demo attests), so there's still work to be done with regards to unit balance and other tweaks. We'll have to wait until the final release to see if a game that puts such devastating powers into the hands of the players -- such as leveling, flooding, or freezing whole chunks of the map -- can really be balanced out. In the meantime, check over at FilePlanet.com to download the demo when it premieres on Tuesday!