Indie Game: The spring project

Every RTS gamer worth anything knows about Total annihilation, right? It's the father of large scale strategy gaming, and for it's time completely revolutionized the genre. The most fundamental difference was that the recourse gathering system. It was more about a balancing act between income and the constant output due to construction, rather than stockpiling to make specific units, this led to a much more dynamic experience. But, the problem was, with all games back then, the technology. There was only so much you could zoom out, and it never really looked nice, even to games at the time. But, regardless, the game had a huge fan following, due to the incredible amount of content, that stemmed from the very fact the game had subpar visuals that could easily be recreated.

For the sake of this review, i'm only going to take into account the content based off the original TA. I'm perfectly aware that the engine has evolved beyond that of simply recreating TA, but in my personal opinion, the TA based content is the best and most playable available, which shows in the lobbys, as the most popular mod played is Balanced Anahliation, or one of its varients.

What the spring project has set out to do, is to simply renovate the original game into a engine which supports fully 3D maps, while using the same models.

Changing this:


To this:

A rather substantial improvement, but does it live up to the originals brilliance? The answer? A short, and deffinate, Yes. The team have done a simply fantastic job, and i would personally even say that due to the incredible amount of content currently available, that the game actually competes with supreme commander, my favorite RTS of all time.

One of the biggest problems I come across when playing indie games would have to be the lack of polish you get with more commercial titles, and i have to say, the lobby system, integrated content downloader, and simply the loading screen screams that this is by far one of the best produced indie games around today. Graphically, its simple, yet charming. The maps and shadow detail is good enough not to be noticeable, and the unit models, while still being of the quality of its predecessors, have a simple charm to them that really differentiates them from each other. The construction vehicles, for example, have a ray that folds out and constructs buildings, and the peewees are the cutest thing that you'll ever see explode a thousand times over. One thing i have to mention though, is the ingame UI is a little shoddy, but its easy to ignore, as it serves its purpose well, and does a good job at not getting in the way.

The gameplay, being that of TA, really doesn't need questioning, its going to be great, i know that, you know that. But the level of tactical choices, coming straight from the diversity of units, is simply astounding. Do i go over this wall with Kbots? Do i build stronger heaver tanks and risk their front defenses? Do i go for a mixture? What about Air units, or even navy? How about artillery? I could start building hovercraft and just go straight over the lake, or build a subsea base and build units from that. The diversity and flexibility never leaves you doing the same thing twice.

But that was already established with TA, right? What we are interested in, is how the new engine works. And it runs on practically anything. I personally have it running on a basic Dell inspiron laptop (1.7ghz dual core, with some crappy intergrated intel graphics device) and its not bad. What i do have to say is, it does seem to have allot of problems with newer hardware. For instance, it has, or at least used to have, a problem with dual core processors. Which was a right pain. It also had a problem with my Nvidea 8600 at the time. Both problems could be fixed with a little tweaking of the settings, and it pretty much can be expected of any indie game running off its own engine, but it was frustrating nevertheless.

And like all indie games of the sort, its constantly being updated and refined. A few months ago, i would've had to of complained about the apparent lack of pathfinding, and the game losing out hugely from it, but the problem has been fixed and rectified. Now to create a front to which your units will evenly space out, you simply draw a line with the right click button, creating a makeshift formation.

But regardless, with a simply huge library of maps, mods and even different games altogether (Kernal panic for example) it's almost certain you'll find something you enjoy. That including its fantastically easy to access recourse center, and even an installer with an option to download the most used content on setup, the game itself couldn't possibly be better implemented and presented.

- GamerGit