Say what you like about game developers in the ‘90s, but they at least knew how to name their games. Look at any list of releases from just about any year in that decade and you’ll find any number of punchy, pithy, interesting-sounding titles. Doom, Warcraft, Civilization  - of course the fact that these games are all classics lends their names a certain familiarity and ease with which they roll off the tongue, but you’d have trouble convincing me that Command & Conquer wasn’t a genius name for the game that popularised the RTS genre. It’s three words and five syllables elegantly structured in such a way that they almost perfectly sum up the product they’re attached to. They’re catchy. They stick in the mind. They’re memorable, so much so that twenty years later just saying them will evoke fond memories of that opening GDI beach assault. They also evoke something that’s been a little bit lost in the intervening two decades; an attitude towards strategy that I wouldn’t exactly call more thoughtful or relaxed, but certainly slower. Starcraft popularised an emphasis on frenetic micromanagement that gradually became dominant throughout the genre, to the point where even the later C&C games aped it (to their great detriment), but there’s a lot of people out there who miss the older, more languid style of Command & Conquer, and would very much like it if somebody made a modern game in that now almost-retro style of RTS.

The good news is that this game now exists. It’s even made by Petroglyph — a studio staffed by some of the last Westwood veterans in the industry — so you’d expect it to nail that old-style RTS feel. And it kind of does, I guess. It’s just that… well, the bad news is that the game is called…

Grey Goo.

Roll that phrase around in your mouth a little. Feel the taste of it on your tongue. Grey Goo. Grey. Goo. This is not a title that brings to mind a resurgence in classic RTS; I’m not saying it’s impossible to use the word Goo when naming your game, but that game had damn well better be a whimsical puzzler a la World of Goo. It’s an inherently comic word, both onomatopoeically and because its meaning is just a few steps removed from the childish high point of watching Noel’s House Party on a Saturday evening. Where Command & Conquer sounded authoritative and decisive, Grey Goo just sounds faintly ridiculous. (Indeed, it gets even more ridiculous in the mission cutscenes, when exquisitely rendered CGI characters utter such immortal lines of dialogue as “I won’t rest until every drop of goo has been destroyed!”) I know they’re trying to tap into the modern zeitgeist of those depressingly regular hysterical news reports wherein science goes mad and creates out-of-control nanobots that will consume everything, but it really does boggle my mind that, like Mass Effect 3’s ending, the name Grey Goo made it through an entire company’s worth of people without anyone standing up and saying “This is really goddamn stupid.”¹

So right from the offset Grey Goo is operating with a serious credibility deficit, which is a shame because it’s the best game Petroglyph have made . If you’re aware of my opinions regarding previous Petroglyph games this may seem like faint praise indeed, but I do mean it; it’s the first Petroglyph game I’ve played that I didn’t fall out of within three missions of starting the campaign. It does a decent job of fusing older concepts I last saw in C&C (you can build walls in this game, for crying out loud) with newer innovations such as three very asymmetric factions who each have their own super-unit lurking at the end of the tech tree. It follows the same C&C structure of having face-to-face mission briefings interspersed with nice CGI cutscenes that function as your reward for completing a mission. It even has an outstanding score by Frank Klepacki which is easily the best work he’s done since Red Alert 2. And yet despite all this, despite the obvious care and effort that’s gone into preserving some of that old C&C feeling while simultaneously trying to move this antiquated portion of the genre forward, Grey Goo still feels incredibly underwhelming.

More than any other Petroglyph game, Grey Goo is a reasonable collection of decent-to-nice ideas that really don’t come together. The factions are each designed to be quite distinct in terms of playstyle: you’ve got the Beta, who are probably the most “traditional” faction, all bullets and walkers and artillery with a visual aesthetic that’s full of belching smokestacks and whose gimmick is that they can mount most of their units onto walls (and onto the Beta super-unit) as turrets; the Humans, who field very gleamingly high-tech robotic units (a nice touch is that there’s maybe three actual humans in the entire game because they’re supposed to be explorers, although they certainly don’t seem to have a problem with letting their drones slaughter other intelligent species for them) and who can teleport their structures around to where they’re most needed; and the Goo, who are going to need a whole other paragraph to explain them because they’re so non-traditional.

The Goo faction is probably the most innovative part of Grey Goo. You start the game with a single Mother Goo, a huge amorphous blob that you promptly plonk down onto one of the catalyst pools that function as this game’s resources. The Mother Goo won’t gather those resources and convert them into spendable currency like the other races do; instead, the catalyst feeds the Mother Goo directly, causing it to grow both in size and hitpoints. Once the Mother Goo hits a certain size threshold it can hive off parts of itself into either Small or Large Proteans, or another Mother Goo. These are all varying sizes of amorphous blob, but they’re all fully mobile (albeit a bit slow), can climb cliffs and other usually-impassible terrain with ease, have a caustic attack that damages any enemy units they touch, and — most importantly — can be converted into other more conventional types of Goo unit at any time. This is unfortunately the part where the innovation breaks down somewhat, as the need for the Goo to have units to fulfil all of the stock RTS unit roles means that a Goo-tank is still a tank even if it stomps around on six legs rather than tank treads, but it still results in a faction that plays dramatically differently to the other two. The Goo is far more mobile than the Beta or the Humans and can shift its Mother Goos around with ease (and in fact the Goo AI is a massive pain the ass because it abuses this ability to the utmost), allowing it to quickly take over most of the map and start pumping out units from every catalyst pool it can get its tendrils on; but the flipside of that is that the Goo has no base structures of any kind and is entirely reliant on its units to overwhelm the enemy.

Now, aside from the mobile Mother Goo units there’s nothing particularly unconventional about how the Goo plays — or at least nothing we haven’t seen before; it’s a faction that takes a lot of inspiration from Starcraft’s Zerg as the side with the cheap swarm units that it can pump out very quickly. The Mother Goo and the Proteans make them different enough to be interesting, though, as it’s a rare example of a game mechanic servicing a theme rather than a design goal and having it all work out fine in the end. The other two factions are much more overtly artificial in the way they play — there’s no good reason for the Human buildings to require a connection to power lines that are manually constructed by the player, except that that’s their gimmick — which I do think hurts them a little bit as playing them is an experience that’s more-or-less indistinguishable from Universe at War, which was the last time Petroglyph tried to resurrect the old-school RTS. The Beta and Humans are well-designed in a clinical, forgettable sort of way,  with nothing about them that sticks in the mind other than the Australian accents sported by the Beta. Command & Conquer was a game about near-future warfare using mostly conventional human weaponry, yet I still remember stuff like the Hand of Nod and the Obelisk of Light. I feel like a game about far-future warfare should have allowed Petroglyph far more latitude to make fun, memorable units and factions, and yet I couldn’t tell you the name of a single Human or Beta unit besides the Beta Commando – and that was just because he kept popping up on the holophone with his name helpfully stencilled under the screen.

That’s not so much a problem for how the game plays, however. I won’t remember anything except the Goo in a year’s time, but that’s a failure of theme rather than mechanics, and as far as mechanics are concerned the Humans and the Beta were engaging enough to keep me playing throughout their campaigns. The part where the failure of theme does start to bleed over into the mechanics, though, is in the visual design of the units. Being able to instantly identify a unit based on its silhouette and movement is a very important element of any RTS both for the controlling player and for the player fighting against it, and Grey Goo has the same problem that the Supreme Commander games did in that this is pretty much impossible because everything looks the same. In SC’s case it at least has the excuse that you’re viewing the action from a thousand feet up where everything looks like a tiny dot on the landscape, but there’s no reason why every single one of the Human units should be a crescent-shaped hovering robot². Yes, the details are different, but you don’t have time to zoom in and visually inspect units for fine detail when you’re in the middle of a raging firefight, and so you end up being reduced to identifying units based on size alone – or in my case, you bypass the problem by only ever building one type of unit: tanks.

If you wanted to play a game where you hunker down behind your base defences building up an irresistible force of tanks before sweeping over the paltry enemy forces, then Grey Goo pretty much has you covered. I guess this is somewhat fitting for a game that consciously wants to be a throwback to the series that invented the tank rush, and it’s not like it doesn’t make an effort to spice things up a bit with Starcraft-style mission objectives, but it does render the various things the game does to try and move this style of RTS forward a little bit moot when the most effective strategy is still to construct 30 tanks and then do an attack-move order into the enemy base. They make it so easy for you; base defences are really, really powerful and can only really be taken down by artillery, which the AI seems a little reluctant to field; while the new walls block vision and must be destroyed before you (or the AI) can even see what’s behind them, making it trivially easy to set up an impenetrable killing field. You can try to play proactively by seizing control of vital points on the map with groups of specialised units, but unfortunately the AI doesn’t give a shit about resources (it doesn’t appear to use them in campaign missions, judging from the number of bases I took down that still had full resource pools when I’d completely exhausted mine) and will continue to spam wave after wave of troops at you that will gradually wear you down. It’s best to just let those waves break against the bulwark of your defences — which you can at least repair in between attacks — whilst constructing an unstoppable tide of tanks, which despite what the tooltips say, are good against all unit types and not much less effective than artillery at taking down buildings. Then you do that attack-move, and then you win.

Now, I can hardly complain about this. I bought Grey Goo because I wanted something that was deliberately reminiscent of that old-school style of RTS gameplay, and Grey Goo certainly delivered on that count. Its failing was not really one of design; all of the bits and pieces you need to make an excellent C&C game are present and correct, and it even does something pretty new and interesting with the Goo faction. In terms of theme and character, though, I’d struggle to name a less memorable game I’d played in the last year. It’s the classic Petroglyph problem: their previous games weren’t particular slouches when it came to design either, but they were seriously lacking in the degree of vision and polish required to make a disparate collection of design ideas come together into a coherent whole. Grey Goo is no different. It’s a decently-made game that’s missing a soul, and it’s difficult to come up with a pithy, punchy title summing up your game when your game is about nothing in particular, really. Which is probably why it got lumbered with Grey Goo. Mystery solved.

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Gnomishlich asks

Could I ask your thoughts on Petroglyph Studios, specifically Universe at War: Earth Assault? I’ve always thought of it as ahead of its time, but bogged down by implementation issues. your thoughts?

Oh. Petroglyph. Those guys.

For those not in the know, Petroglyph was formed by the last group of Westwood refugees back in 2003 when EA turned off the life support that was keeping the zombified husk of the studio alive and merged what was left with EA Pacific. Westwood were responsible for a couple of minor PC hits you may have heard of, such as Command & Conquer, Red Alert and all that jazz. In theory Petroglyph were well placed to carry on where Westwood had left off, immediately beginning work on two RTSes that eventually came to market in 2006 and 2007. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.

I own both of Petroglyph’s initial games. The first — Star Wars: Empire at War – actually scares me a little bit because I have no recollection of buying it. Like, at all. The first I knew of it was when I was trying to sort out my Steam games and stumbled across it when browsing through my library, accompanied by a muttered “What the fu-?” I own just shy of 400 full games and expansion packs on Steam, and with the sole exception of Empire at War I can remember buying every single one — even the ones that were part of massive pack deals that led to me owning such gaming luminaries as CivCity Rome and Midnight Club Street Racing. I could probably even put a rough date on when I bought most of them.

So when I found Empire at War in my games list I was somewhat taken aback, to put it mildly. If Steam can make buying games so easy that I don’t even remember the rationale that led to me forking over money for something I didn’t really want then we’re all in serious trouble. Fortunately it seems to have been something of an isolated incident rather than the start of a trend, possibly exacerbated by Star Wars: Empire at War being one of the most forgettable games in existence.

This is odd considering it does make an effort to break from the RTS formula of base building and tank rushing¹. Empire at War does the Total War split between a empire map where you build units and move armies and fleets that switches to a conventional RTS with tiny mans shooting at each other whenever two armies come to battle. It really shouldn’t be as boring as it is, and yet the moment John William’s score starts playing over the empire map I feel this weird narcotic effect starting to seep into my bloodstream. It’s not particularly the game’s fault, but Star Wars is, for my money, one of the most dull and ill-defined sci-fi universes in existence. The space combat is the only thing that really translates across into games since it’s based on World War 2 carrier vs carrier battles, and so everything that isn’t part of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series (okay, maybe I’ll give Rogue Squadron some points here too) has actually suffered from being set in the Star Wars universe. Yes, even the Jedi Knight games.

I’ll probably end up expanding on such a contentious statement next month sometime, but for now it’s a phenomenon that manifests itself as “grey and pointy syndrome”. To wit: the Star Destroyer design is fairly iconic what with the opening of the original Star Wars film and all, but when you’re designing an RTS in which unit differentiation is going to be key making every single ship an identical grey and pointy shape does not do wonders for the game’s visual variety. It’s intimidating to see a fleet of Star Destroyers on screen in the films; it’s frustrating to see them flying around on your computer monitor because you can’t tell the difference between them. Even the sodding TIEs changed wing shape and silhouette from model to model. A complete lack of any sense of destruction from the trademark Star Wars blat-blat lasers merely reinforced the sense that I was watching a collection of grey pointy things engage in a not-particularly-interesting light show, not a space battle.

Anyway, Empire at War may or may not be a bad game but I’m never going to find out, it’s just that dull to me. Universe at War at least features colours that are not “black” and “grey”, and furthermore lured me in with the promise that I’d get to play with a mobile oppression palace.  Unfortunately when I finally got around to trying to play it a few months back it bore more than a passing resemblance to an RTS after the C&C 3 model where everything hurtles around the map at 900mph and you don’t have time to differentiate between units to figure out what does what. Which is puzzling, come to think of it, because I remember playing a demo back when Universe at War was released at the start of 2008 and thinking it was a fairly okay game. It definitely hasn’t aged well in terms of interface; when I played it more recently the main thing that jumped out at me wasn’t the gameplay or the units or the graphics, but that the blocky text was ugly as sin. Here, look at this screenshot. Look at the numbers in the top right corner. It looks like they’ve used Arial Bold, for crying out loud.

It might seem like a fairly minor thing to get hung up on, but it’s just symptomatic of the fact that I didn’t think Universe at War was particularly polished, like they just slapped an RTS together out of parts they had round the back and called it a day. Also – and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, here – I get the distinct impression that each race gets its own UI design and style, except the game starts you out as the humans who are a tutorial race who just get this very ugly, bare-bones interface through which to play the game. It was just massively offputting to me, especially since the game should have been handing me the mobile oppression palace from the off and telling me to crush some puny humans as its tutorial, not giving me inferior terrestrial technology to fight off alien invaders. That’s not a tutorial. That’s kicking the player in the nuts as a greeting and expecting them to enjoy the rest of the game.

So I didn’t get that far into Universe at War. It may have been groundbreaking and ahead of its time, but the hour or so I saw of it was crushingly conventional and utterly off-putting. I dislike ragging on games just because they had a bad opening (Planescape: Torment taught me a salutary lesson here when it took me a year to escape from the Mortuary because it was so grim and unappealing) so I’m not going to make any pronouncements as to Universe at War’s overall level of quality. It might well be a good game. I don’t know. Just as with Empire at War, though, I’m probably never going to find out seeing as I have zero desire to give it another try. There’s just something about Petroglyph’s games that rubs me up the wrong way, and this is puzzling given the team’s pedigree. Either they haven’t been able to move forward with their thinking since 1996, or some of the key movers and shakers responsible for the design of C&C didn’t make the jump across to Petroglyph. A shame, really. The video game market does need somebody pumping out the odd dedicated RTS to keep the concept fresh and to iterate on its design. It’s just not these guys.

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1. Yes, I know that hasn’t actually been the formula for a good decade or so now.

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