Description

The story's execution is carried off really well; the cinematics and voice work are top notch. The actual story, well, judge for yourself. Basically, sometime in the next decade humanity decides to kick out all the power-mongering totalitarian bad folks that currently dominate our society. This leads to war, but by 2012 the good guys win and for the next 20 years there is a time of complete peace. The bad guys, it turns out, have just been biding their time; they're preparing for war -- and the peaceful humans must relearn what they've forgotten about war. For the player this comes in the form of the Antaeus, a super advanced adaptive cruiser that uses nanotechnology to build planes, tanks and the like -- controlled by humans that have already died but were imprinted on soulcatcher chips. Clearly we're in for some amazing technological advancements in the next 10 years!

Gameplay is mission-based. As Captain of the Antaeus you'll be given goals at the start of every mission. -- accomplish the goals and the mission ends. There are 21 missions in the game, and they run in length from quick 10-minute episodes to much longer pitched battles that will require extensive resource gathering and combat. The missions don't carry resources over from one to another, so there's no point in gaining more resources than what's needed to beat the mission. The missions are story-driven and will often add goals as the mission unfolds. Besides gathering resources and destroying enemy installations, you'll be stealing technologies from the enemy quite often in order to increase the technology tree. As the technology tree unfolds, you'll be able to specialize each vehicle with different technologies, besides assigning the individual soulcatcher humans to pilot.

As captain the player can jump into any of the vehicles of the fleet and take control, or command the vehicles from the 3D battlefield or the isometric perspective War Room. Jumping into the vehicles in order to move them or scout around for details is usually a good plan, but when it comes to battle it's actually easier to turn command back over to the human pilot -- they're damn good at their jobs. The ability to control the game like a traditional RTS or jump into the action is pretty exciting; we'd like to see something done with this in a multiplayer format as well.

The interface for controlling the vehicles is pretty simple, and so is controlling things from the War Room. On the battlefield in real time, controlling vehicles can get a bit tricky, but with the option to get into the War Room anytime it's not a huge problem. The beta already has a great tutorial that walks the player through the steps needed to control everything about the Antaeus and its systems.

Rage Games, the developer, has created a really nice-looking 3D engine, as you can see from the screenshots. What the screenshots don't demonstrate is the massively interactive environment. Almost every building and gun can be destroyed and gathered up as resources. You'll also see people outside of some buildings. Yes, you can shoot them, and yes, blood and body parts will remain. Cool, huh?

Overall we're seeing a very well put together product that's offering something not seen in the RTS genre. --DailyRadar.com