Hills, plateaus and fortresses can all be found in Total Annihilation, where they were used in a more interesting fashion than in Machines. Of course if there are terrain advantages in Machines, they are given to the computer to make up for the poor AI. Water exists on a few maps and no units except certain APC's and flying units can travel over it, it's rarely used to good effect. While the terrain is completely 3D, it hasn't been used to move the game forward. The hills are often in very predictable places and rarely offer any tactical advantage that can be exploited. While it's all very impressive, the terrain tends to be a bit sparse. The design of the characters, especially the Reaper and the Gorilla machines is excellent. Plasma fire lights up the night sky, nukes white wash your screen and the vortex creator spits a mushroom of black hole terror. There's moons and other planets in the sky, night and day progress (with little tactical effect) and the colours used in the game are all, well, very colourful. Explosions are also well done and I love the way the screen wobbles when buildings explode and the Gorilla machine uses its 'ground punch' attack. The landscapes, units and buildings, even the gun fire, are 3D, with more polygons than you can shake a stick at.
While we're on the subject of glowing, the game is visually spectacular.
And frankly, I've never been described in such glowing terms before. But where, you may ask, does the player fit into this rollar coaster ride of resource gathering? Well, the Eden 4 prime controller has created several experimental, semi-autonomous AI subprocesses (that's you) to carry out the military offensive against the insidious Midian machines.
The campaign has a nice learning curve, although once you hit the 13th mission things start to get very, very hard. As per RTS usual, there's a mix of base building and the rather weaker missions where the player merely has to control one force of non-refundable machines. Just crush the other in the 20, linear, one sided missions. Don't expect C&C or Starcraft twists and turns in this game. While it tells you absolutely nothing about the story, it does show off the new fangeled camera angles and graphics off nicely. The same principle can in seen in the stirring in-game engine intro. Because cut-scenes are rare and don't advance the overall story as opposed to the current mission, who really knows what's going on in the big, bad, humanless world out there. Unfortunately the prime directive of "colonize above all else" overrides the love machines usually have for each other and both sides decide to re-colonize the other sides already colonized planets, even if it means "the greatest war the universe has ever seen.the Machine War". These legions of 'machines' (the term robots is never used, maybe Mr.Asimov owns it) continued to colonize their solar systems and planets for hundreds of years, until two races of machines evolved, the Midian and Eden 4 groups. In 2545 human kind died but its interplanetary colonization program, consisting of, you guessed it, self-aware AI super computers just kept going and going and going. The story of Machines is not a terribly involving or complicated one. The question is, does Machines do anything with these graphics to enhance the gameplay that has already been taken to new heights by Starcraft and Total Annihilation, among others? Unfortunetly the answer is no, but Machines does manage to be an enjoyable game in its own right. While the graphics in Machines certainly aren't comparable to those found in other genres, it's still a step up from some of the rather bland sprites and terrain found in other RTS's. It has a first person view, a floating camera view, and a standard top-down view, but more on that later. Machines ( along with the likes of Warzone 2100 - Ed.) is attempting to bring us a new generation of RTS games. While Battlezone , Urban Assault and Uprising have used 3D, these games are fundamentally different from your standard RTS because they are built around the first person view.
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The real time strategy genre where the player harvests minerals, creates bases, pumps out military units and sends them to their deaths is one full of quality games but most have yet to harness the new 3D technology ( Myth, as a purely tactical game doesn't count). It was inevitable that someone would bring the kind of graphics usually reserved for flight sims and first person shooters to the strategy table.
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