I think most people on the Internet would have by now seen the art by Polish artist Jakub Różalski that inserts giant mechs into late 19th-century or early 20-century settings. This art inspired a board game set in its own fictional universe and it was apparently successful enough to make this RTS game viable. Unfortunately I don’t think this game did too well. I bought for pretty cheap a while ago as I too was intrigued by the art of Różalski and wanted to know more about the world it inspired. Plus I have fond memories of playing Company of Heroes and thought that this might be somewhat similar.

While most of us might be more reach more readily for the First World War, this game takes on a more Poland-centric perspective and hence it draws from the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. In this world, all major countries field mechs as war machines built on the technology of Nikola Tesla and the names of all countries are slightly altered. The single-player portion of the game includes three campaigns, one each for Polania, Rusviet and Saxony. These are the three factions available in the base game and you can probably guess from their names alone what their real-world equivalents are. I won’t describe the plot in detail except to say that it’s centered around the hero characters of each faction and the writing is surprisingly solid. While there’s a fair amount of fighting against one another, the heroes eventually realize that the real enemy is a shadowy conspiracy present in all three nations that is deliberately trying to instigate a full-blown war. It’s also not a huge spoiler to say the story eventually brings in Tesla himself.

The campaign missions seem fairly well designed too, featuring the usual mix of ones where you actually have a base to build units in and the ones where you have to shepherd a hero unit or two, with perhaps some backup, carefully through a level. In line with the game’s fairly modest population cap, even the largest battles never feels very large, which I suppose lines up well with the story not really being an outright war but minor skirmishes and incursions of various kinds. At medium difficulty, I didn’t find any of them are too hard though one or two may be frustrating. In one for example, Tesla is able to send units at you through underground tunnels at multiple points throughout the map so you have a whack-a-mole situation trying to catch them all. Each mission doesn’t take too long to play either as the AI factions don’t have huge sprawling bases.

Unfortunately while the missions aren’t bad, I can’t say that I was particularly enthused about the gameplay either. One major reason at least isn’t the developer’s fault, it’s just that RTS is kind of a has-been genre and most people have had their fill of them already. It’s kind of nostalgic to go back to this kind of gameplay but having to juggle control groups, micro-manage special abilities, guess where enemies will be coming from on the map just isn’t a lot of fun for the current me any more. Missions where you control a single hero or a small group of units to navigate a map are simpler in scope, but I also feel that the general RTS is trying to encompass too many game styles. There are proper stealth games and tactical squad games out there so why compromise with a jack of all trades title like this? A fine example of a properly specialized stealth RTS would be Shadow Tactics that I played earlier this year.

But I also found myself disliking the game’s particular design choices. Micro-management is extremely powerful in this game, you can and are supposed to carefully maneuver squads of infantry to attack machinegun emplacements from the sides for example. A hero can practically dance in circles around big mechs. At the same time, units are very squishy and even the biggest mechs can go down really fast when you’re not paying attention. Infantry squads can be wiped out so quickly that they feel like disposable chaff. Yes, they can take cover but that doesn’t seem to matter when a mech can walk right on top of them. It just seems so much easier to spend your very limited population cap on the big mechs that can handle everything and send them in, backed up perhaps by some cheap field guns. Defensive structures in this game are kind of weak too and there aren’t a ton of building options here. Combined with how units seem pretty quick to build in the game, the intent seems to be fluid gameplay that moves back and forth quickly and rewards the player who is able to react quickly and micro-manage a whole lot. I probably would prefer a more deliberative, slower game.

Finally this game even so long after its release still feels unpolished and janky. I’m annoyed for example at the half-second or so pause when you hit the escape key to bring up the menu which makes the game feel unresponsive. A few times, it looks like units get stuck in the terrain. Even the transition from game to cinematic and back again feels iffy. Sometimes I got a black screen and had to exit and restart the game. The graphics look kind of dated and unimpressive for a game that was released just last year. I suppose the art design is good but technically this game really does seem lackluster. I did power through to the end of the campaigns but this wasn’t a game that I liked much at all and I think it will represent the last gasp of the RTS genre for me. I don’t think I will ever buy another full-blown RTS like this again.