Rock Raiders and Shadowgrounds

I'm not posting this as a review because the game got too tedious to finish. I did play a full day of the game, though.


As you can see, Rock Raiders is something of an RTS (realtime strategy game). As such, the central mechanic is telling your little guys what to do. The two main methods of doing this are clicking on them to give direct orders and clicking on terrain to specify what you want done and letting the AI handle it. The AI is only barely functional, and you'll often find your little guys doing the lowest priority task first, going all the way across the map to pick up building materials when they were standing right next to the supply building, and so on. They'll occasionally commit suicide by working in squares overtaken by lava. I suppose some would consider this diligence. But it's stupidity.

There's also no way to review your mission objectives in game, and there are structures, vehicles, and terrain features whose purpose is not specified. It's like Dwarf Fortress for kids.


If you're completely fed up with the AI, you can take the game into first person. The 3D engine is pretty shoddy with polygon gaps and other problems that went out with the PlayStation 1, but wandering around your little base and watching the other guys work is still pleasing.

So why did I play it all day? It's like Dwarf Fortress for kids. Figuring stuff out for yourself is rewarding, in suitable doses. Also, I kept playing it thinking how, with some polish, it could be a really great game. It really never needed to be 3D either. It could have been a perfectly good isometric or overhead game. Regardless, I'd gotten a bit tired of blowing stuff up and wanted to do something constructive. It was a good change of pace.

I also played a bit of Shadowgrounds last night. It's an overhead third person shooter. It tries to be Aliens, right down to the motion tracker, but the creepy atmosphere is undercut by really flat characters and robotic animation. And the action, well, maybe I didn't play enough to judge, but I didn't find it very fun. Your character is slow, the guns lack punch, and the overhead perspective puts me too far away from the action. Also the co-op multiplayer, which was the only reason I was really interested in it to begin with, is not networked. And from the screenshots I've seen, it's not even split screen so you all have to agree on which way to go. Nevermind.