An age we don't really care to revisit.
It's tough to review a game like this, one that's deliberately designed as a throwback to the gameplay and presentation aesthetics of mid-90s RTSes. If I were to say it feels old and tired, many might counter that SunAge is supposed to and I'm missing the point of the experience. Maybe so, but I can't help but feel that SunAge does, in fact, feel old and tired, and given how far along RTS games have moved since the days of games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft, it's odd to see a "nostalgia" title that still manages to unnecessarily tamper with what most gamers consider to be basic elements of presentation and control.
As far as gameplay goes, SunAge relies on the old-school tenets of base building, unit cap management, and resource collection via gathering trucks. Four types of resources, green, yellow, blue, and red, represent technology tiers. So you start out gathering blue, then are forced to expand your base to grab green, yellow, and finally red to access more powerful production structures, research options, and unit types.
Base expansion in SunAge can be really quick, a result of one of the game's more unique features: an energy network. Each building needs power to operate, so you have to connect a series of pylons that link to a central power core. This means as long as you've got a string of pylons connecting your base to any part of the map, you can build structures connected to it to pump out units, construct static defenses, or set up another resource collection point.
Unfortunately, since multiplayer has yet to be released for the game (though it's been repeatedly promised by Vertex4 on their forums), you're forced to spend your time vying against a brainless AI in skirmishes or slogging through an uninspired, poorly paced, and tedious single-player campaign.
There's a story here, about how humanity ravaged the Earth through nuclear war and a group that becomes known as the Federals winds up having to take refuge in self-contained domes. Those excluded from domes are gradually warped by the harsh conditions and name themselves the Raak-Zun, mutant survivalists bent on tearing apart dome-dwellers. Their conflict is later on interrupted by the appearance of the Sentinels, a race of vicious alien robots. It's not exactly the most original tale, dragged further down by stale, cardboard characters, an awful art style and generic dialogue. That being said, the game does deliver an occasional gem of a line, dripping with camp, such as, "This must have been how earth looked before the wasteland – before the wars and radiation took their toll. Except this jungle is crawling with killer robots." That kind of thing hardly keeps the campaign afloat, though.
Since narrative and character aren't really chief components of what makes an RTS entertaining, many may be able to overlook these flaws. The presentation issues, on the other hand, will likely prove more irritating. First thing you'll notice is the poorly designed user interface, which plasters the screen with a giant blue circle to indicate each unit's firing range. Then there's the awkwardness of issuing attack orders. Instead of being able to simply right-click a visible enemy and watch your troops move into range to start an assault, you have to manually move the targets into range and wait for them to attack. Once within range targets can be "tagged," meaning right-clicked while in combat to focus unit fire, but sometimes this doesn't seem to function consistently, with units choosing targets you didn't intend.
Each type of unit can be "grouped," meaning combined with others of its unit type and then commanded as a single unit, given formation-move orders, or given time-delay orders to coordinate movement with other groups. Vertex4 here makes another strange decision by making it impossible to drag-select different types of units. Though you'll eventually get used to this, it's an unnecessary nuisance. For instance, if you've got a group of riflemen standing next to a group of rocket soldiers, you can't actually select them simultaneously to issue orders. This shouldn't be a problem for any RTS veteran, as the solution requires you hotkey numerous units, which most are used to – it's just odd to be restricted from selecting multiple groups at once.
The interface isn't all bad, though. You can queue up build orders with your construction units like you might have experienced in Supreme Commander, so that certainly helps for speeding along energy network construction and setting up defensive perimeters. Some of the units do have interesting functionalities, particularly when you start to discover all their secondary functions that can be researched at the appropriate structure. And games can actually become pretty interesting once you've developed a power network across a map, since the connecting pylons can be taken out rather quickly and you need to balance how large of a network you build versus what you can adequately defend. For me, however, I never managed to really get over the awkward control scheme – managing the battlefield proved to be too much of hassle to really be enjoyable.
Reviewers harangued the game upon its European release last year for being made available in a buggy, nearly unplayable state. With the updated version we tried out, many of the frequent complaints, such as unstable save files and crashes to desktop, seem to be ironed out. Granted there's still no multiplayer, so you may want to wait for that to release before diving in if the game sounds interesting to you.
The best part of the game is the sprite-based graphics, with maps and units sporting a surprising amount of detail. A few more flashy effects are mixed in from time to time to an effective degree, and the sight of a fully developed base, with its matrix of criss-crossing power wires can be quite pretty. The cartoon art panels that populate the cut-scenes, however, are truly awful, and you're unfortunately forced to stare at them quite frequently.
Closing Comments
With SunAge, it's really a question of whether you're willing to put up with clumsy UI and control scheme to play a game that, for the most part, feels like it was or could have been made 10 years ago, and even then it would have been a middling game. You're far better off reinstalling something like StarCraft or Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Evoking nostalgia is certainly a worthy goal for a game, but there's got to be something compelling worth staying for after the memories fade.
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