Imperium Galactica

Sneaking in next is Imperium Galactica, a criminally overlooked game using a futuristic space setting. It featured 3 key aspects, and required a lot of effort in the part of the player in order to be successful.  The game featured city building (in the style of a simplified Sim City), space combat, and ground combat (both also quite simplistic and limiting). Putting all 3 of these simplistic aspects together however resulted in a highly enjoyable game with a fairly good story. Using an odd twist, the rest of the Universe expands and develops around you, so the longer you take to complete the first few fixed missions, the harder the later game will be.

Imperium Galactica: Difficult to find interesting screenshots of.

In the year 2000 Imperium Galactica 2 hit the scene, soon to be overlooked as much as its predecessor. The game added polish to the inspired original, the game consistently seeming to scream: “I’m better than I was, pay attention to me”.  The ground battles were phenomenally improved, as was space combat, and the ability this time around to automate the often tedious city building. The story continued to evolve in a satisfying way, and provided some interesting choices that could affect the outcome of your campaign.  It’s hard to comprehend the sheer scale of what the developers were trying to achieve without actually playing the game, and it’s a shame we’re not going to see a third iteration as the series certainly held a lot of promise.

Total Annihilation

At a point at which RTS games were appearing to have become a little more stagnant, a beautiful game called Total Annihilation was released in 1997, introducing us to 3D terrain and all the fun and logic that went with it. At the time it was completely groundbreaking; the line of sight of units was blocked by hills, some units couldn’t cross certain terrain, and going uphill was slower than going downhill, just to name a few changes.  While the new game mechanics allowed for a lot more interesting battles, the overall game was let down by another new premise: Vast numbers of different units. Cavedog at launch were releasing one a day, meaning that every army could have 200 units, all completely different. While each of the two forces closely mirrored each other, the game was impossible to play with any element of strategic planning as there were just too many units to decide what you were going to build.  The single player campaign was more of a chore than a pleasure, but the multiplayer more than made up for this. Whilst TA was a step in the right direction, it also made several steps in to no-mans land which are better left forgotten.

Total Annihilation: groundbreaking, explosive, mental.

Following on from their groundbreaking first release, Cavedog later went on to release TA: Kingdoms in 1999, dropping the futuristic setting for a fantasy setting. Overall the game felt as though it was a step back from the original, bringing with it a formula that hadn’t really worked that well for the first game.  The fact that this was the last TA game to be released was rather telling of its reception.