Decent RTS with interesting mechanics and good gameplay. The campaign is split into parts, following each of the three races in one continuous story. Quite slow-paced so if you like faster-paced RTS, like Starcraft 2, this might not be up your alley

Grey Goo is a brand new intellectual property, something that feels all too rare nowadays and even rarer is a real time strategy game. I originally thought the name was silly until I did some googling and came across the hypothetical end of the world scenario where rampant self replicating nano-sized robots would devour every living thing on the planet in the search for greater material with which to build more of itself. This piqued my interest. Then it was released that the creators of this game were video game developers Petroglyph Games made up of the original members of Westwood Studios, the creators of the Command and Conquer series. The prodigal sons had returned. Needless to say this game has been riding the hype train amongst lovers of the RTS genre ever since its announcement, as RTS lovers have been left wanting for games to play, I mean unless you have some kind of genetic mutation that makes you immune to the effects of carpal tunnel syndrome and are still playing Star Craft 2.

Grey Goo is thankfully a good game, perhaps even very good with the potential to become excellent if its developers continue to support the game and listen to the community that has quickly grown up around the game. Like its spiritual predecessors C&C and Star Craft it comprises of three different factions, a technologically advanced human race that has a horde of artificial intelligent controlled machines to wage war with, the alien Beta’s that use the power of industry to build powerful mechanised war vehicles and lastly the most interesting of them the titular grey goo who are giant blobs of nano-machines that absorb all in their path to replicate and spread throughout the map. While the humans and Beta ultimately play very similarly to each other and would be immediately recognisable to any passing RTS gamer with strong emphasis on base building, managing their economy and producing the correct variations of unit types the goo is an entirely different beast altogether and something that I haven’t seen done before.

The goo instead of having different centres of production and resource gathering have just one unit called the mother goo that acts as a kind of mobile base, heavy unit and resource producer all in one. The mother goo moves between resource pools to collect material which it then uses to produce either another mother goo, light or heavy goos or an ultimate unit that wreaks devastation anywhere it goes. the light and heavy goos themselves can then morph into a slew of other units for specific tasks such as anti air or artillery support and can all be done in the heat of battle. The goo has a weakness, however, in that to effectively gather resources the numerous mother goos that you will ultimately have must be micromanaged much more than the other two races.

The humans have a strong focus on base building and have the odd mechanic that all of their buildings must be linked by power struts connected to the central base, while this at first seems unduly restricting it immediately becomes clear that without it humans would be near unstoppable. Humans enjoy a wide range of defensive turrets that the other two races are noticeably lacking in and gain access to strong air units remarkably fast making them masters of both defence and fast offense. The centralised base building ultimately makes it harder for the humans to maintain their supply lines as factories must be built close to the central hub while defenseless ‘worker’ units must instead move across the map and into harms way. The alien Betas are a mixture of both the goo and the humans in that they have the ability to build structures anywhere they have line of sight meaning that they can spread rapidly across the map but each structure must be connected to a central power hub that is generally an easy target.

Grey Goo also features something that RTS games have been severely lacking in recent years being an excellent single player campaign. In the same vein as C&C the story of grey goo is shown through excellent videos before and after each mission while its predecessor benefitted from gloriously campy live action clips grey goo has beautifully rendered cg cut scenes. The story is well scripted and almost unbelievably contains characters that I actually care about. The control system has also been vastly improved from these earlier titles with the creation of a quick key control scheme based on the wasd keys which feels incredibly natural and makes you feel like a bad ass StarCraft 2 player in no time at all.

I started off talking about grey goo with the statement that it is a good game but unfortunately it isn’t great. I ran into slight fps drops towards the end of some games where the units involved can number in the thousands as each faction not only has its little worker bees scurrying around for loot but also the hundred or so combat units clashing against one another, it only happened a handful of times but I suspect those with battlestations even a little worse off than myself will experience issues. The longevity of the game is also an issue as I have put approximately 40 hours into the game as of my writing this and am starting to slow down as there are limited official maps so far and many of my online games all fell very much the same. This will undoubtedly improve in the coming weeks as more people begin to play, however, it’s something that was constantly on my mind as I played.

Conclusion: The kings of RTS, formerly known as Westwood Studios, going by the name of Petroglyph Games have crafted a solid game that not only welds the formula that they created back with C&C with the new generation of games epitomised by Star Craft 2 but is also well balanced with vastly different race play styles. If you are an RTS nut like myself then you probably have already picked up grey goo and if you haven’t I would recommend doing so. If you are a little hesitant about dropping the full retail price then wait for the first significant price drop as Grey Goo is a game that won’t punish late adopters like Star Craft 2 and will still feature that brilliantly crafted single player story.