Grey Goo may have a funny name, but it’s mission is a serious one. Grey Box and Petroglyph Games have set out to revive the real-time strategy game genre. The two companies have seen stagnation in that area when more than a decade ago the genre was thriving with titles such as Rise of Nations and Age of Empires. From their perspective, the RTS elements have gone out of whack and geared more toward one side or another.
“There was balance and it was base building, economic management and combat,” lead designer Andrew Zoboki said. “But those three things have come out of balance. We’ve developed it so that each of those elements are present. We’re going back to the roots of RTS and building to that.”
The team has spent the better part of two years crafting a sci-fi universe and three factions to inhabit it. They are the Humans, an alien race called the Betas and blob of nanomachines called the Grey Goo. Each group has its own strength and weaknesses, but what’s remarkable is how the team at Petroglyph has managed to create an RTS that feels polished and unique when it comes to gameplay mechanics. Maybe it’s been a while, but Grey Goo feels like something new.
The Betas focus on a modular design with each building connected to a power hub.
A FOCUS ON BASE BUILDING: Going back to the roots of the genre, the team focused on base building. First off, players will worry about one kind of resource. It’s an underground gas, but what’s interesting is that it’s pooled in unusual areas of the map. Sometimes it’ll come in huge swaths that can accommodate multiple harvesters or it can be long, skinny and shared by two opposing factions, creating a reason for conflict. The differing resources affects base building and tactics on the map.
Thankfully, one element players won’t have to worry about is harvesters. It’s all done automatically and they won’t have to worry about making more or maneuvering each one into position. They can still be killed and it slows an opponent’s economy but that’s just one way to defeat a foe. Players will have to focus on other things such as walls that actually work as barriers in the game.
Each race has its own take on walls. Humans set up force fields that allows units to move across and attack effortlessly. Betas are based on a modular design and require gates to let out units. On the plus side, the Betas’ mechs can sit atop them and act as turrets. The Grey Goo can build giant creatures that act as moving walls, soaking up damage. Those are different ways for factions to protect themselves but walls have a secondary effect of creating a fog of war in a player’s base.
A NEW WAY TO USE FOG OF WAR: They prevent opponents from scouting you in addition to keep them out. Of course, air units can always peek across, but that may come later in a match. That same sort of theory extends to the terrain as well. In Grey Goo, there are hills and ridges that give those on top better sightlines than those on the bottom. In fact, ground units below have low visibility and can’t see much of what’s on top making targeting difficult.
When it comes to foliage, players can use guerrilla units for hit-and-run attacks. They can assault enemies on the road and hide in the trees where they’ll be protected from air and ground units. The only way to get rid of guerrillas is to bombard a forest with explosives or send an armored unit inside one to flush them out.
As for the building styles of the three factions, they’re each distinct. The Grey Goo is the most unorthodox. It’s basically a mobile base that can go over mountains and devour any foe. It can spin off different units from its body, grow larger and split into two mother Grey Goos. As I wrote before, the entities they spawn act almost like structures and units. It’s a flexible and mobile setup.
THE HUMAN WAY TO BUILD: Humans are defensive in nature, but they aren’t the gritty soldiers players expect from StarCraft. Their tech is almost like magic and people rarely go into battling and instead let robots to the fighting. They have force field walls, but the race’s base structure is centralized. Players start off with a central headquarters and they spread out from there using conduits that supply energy to each structure.
For example, if the humans want to build a turret near the wall, they’ll need to extend the conduit to power it. The same goes to factories and any other facility. With conduits being the limiting factor, players have to protect these long extension cords or create redundant conduit systems so that power can still get to vital points if the base is attacked.
Another interesting twist is how Petroglyph balances tech buildings and unit-producing structures. With all factions, a tech site has to be touching or attached to a facility for it to produce a certain unit. The move does two things: It makes base building more flexible and it streamlines it. Players won’t have to remember tons of hot keys. They can just remember buildings and plan for each of them. If that’s too difficult, there’s a slick overview bar that shows players all the upgrades and units they can produce and they can click on one or hit the hot key to automatically queue it. The game picks which base to produce it, but Petroglyph allows players to specifically choose the site if they want more granularity to their decisions.
MODULAR BETAS: The Betas have a modular take on base building. Players start with a Power Hub that can accommodate two, four or eight slots. Once that facility is down, it’s up to players to determine if it will produce air or ground units, troops or heavy armor. The tech facilities on the hub will determine what units it produces. That presents players with interesting choices: They can stack a power hub with factories and turn it into a monobuild site or diversify it. The Betas seem to sit somewhere between the turtle-ish nature of the Humans and the unpredictability mobility of the Grey Goo. They can build concentrated bases, effectively putting all their eggs in one basket, or spread them out for surprise attacks.
Lastly, Petroglyph showed the epic unit for the Betas. Each race has one, but they revealed this faction’s first. The Betas can turn one of its power hubs into a giant flying battlefortress called the Hand of Rook. Like all of the Betas’ structures, it is modular and it can hold six other mechs that act as armored turrets. It can toss out nukes. The unit looks like it takes a lot of resources, but it looks like it’ll be worth it and could change the tide of a match. It makes me curious to see what else is in story.
As for the single-player campaign, gamers can expect 15 missions, five for each faction.
Quite frankly, I like what Petroglyph and Grey Box are doing. By going back to the basics, they’re showing that the genre has more to offer, and when done right, the RTS still has plenty of ways to draw a new generation of fans. If they’re successful, the two could breathe new life into the genre in a similar way that Street Fighter IV re-energized the fighting game community. It’ll be interesting to see if this idea takes off when Grey Goo releases this fall on Steam.
Images courtesy of Grey Box
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