zaccasacca

An acclaimed—albeit struggling—RTS studio developing a cute turn-based tactics game full of retro sci-fi Martians and animal soldiers sounds like one of those terrible April Fools' not-jokes that inundate my beleaguered inbox every April 1. But Relic's Earth vs Mars is very real.

Relic takes big swings. Homeworld still feels like a groundbreaking RTS more than 25 years after it launched. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, meanwhile, pushed the troubled RTS genre forward at a time when most 3D strategy games were falling on their faces.

Even when it misses, I still find myself a captive general, eagerly diving into battle after battle. Company of Heroes 3's dynamic campaign was a mess at launch, but it had so much promise—all that dynamism and those narrative hooks—and still held within it a seemingly infinite number of genuinely thrilling, complex RTS brawls full of novelties and smart ideas.

This was not remotely obvious during my first taste of Earth vs Mars.

What we've got is Advance Wars with a bit of Relic's own Impossible Creatures. OK, here's the deal: Mars has invaded, and a generic Earth military force needs to put a stop to this nonsense with tanks, helicopters, soldiers—you know the deal.

Mars attacks

The Martians have some weird sci-fi gizmos, but so does Earth: specifically, the Splice-O-Tron, which lets you splice humans with up to three different animals—from a final roster of 10—to create bespoke supersoldiers. I only had access to three: a fly, cheetah and rhino.

Impossible Creatures gave us 76 critters to splice, but Earth vs Mars lets you get more into the nuts and bolts. See, instead of just splicing an ant and a crocodile, you can splice a rhino, a fly and a cheetah with a human, and then pick specific body parts to alter. Finally, a world where we can give people the noble noggin of the mighty rhino, the sleek gams of the fastest cat around, and also some massive wings from a gross fly. This is, I'll give you, incredibly cool.

Splicing a soldier with a cheetah and a fly gives you an incredibly fast aerial unit who can also spray acid over an area, damaging enemies who start their turn standing in the toxic goo. This isn't really a fly trait, but it's a great ability so I will generously let it slide. And then, I dunno, just give it the arms of a rhino for a laugh. Why not?

Some components, like the arms of a rhino (since I've brought it up a second time, yes, I know, rhinos don't have arms, but they do when unhinged scientists squish them together with human soldiers), only alter the base rummy golds stats of the units, but others confer special abilities or more notable buffs. A rhino tail will give you double counter attack damage, for instance, but you could also just give your rhino-man wings and watch them majestically soar through the heavens.

You can also just go all-in on a single animal. If you want a dedicated healer who also has some survivability, going pure axolotl—unfortunately not available in the demo—seems like a good shout, as it can protect itself in a healing bubble with its head, and heal its pals with its tail. Classic axolotl behaviour.

Fiddling around with the Splice-O-Tron before my first bout, I started to get excited about all the ridiculous possibilities. I even contemplated donning my dressing gown and pretending it was a lab coat. But it was too hot in the flat and I remembered that my own hybrid critter (one part poodle, one part cocker spaniel) had eaten it, so I reluctantly discarded the thought.

Then I actually started playing and… it's fine? The UI feels like it's a placeholder—just because of how basic and unhelpful it is—and honestly the unit art and animation does too. Given this, it seems more likely this is being developed on a bit of a tight budget now that Relic and Sega have split up. But even with that in mind, it just looks rough. Memorable art can be made with limited resources, it just hasn't been this time.

Like Advance Wars, it's a lightweight, accessible tactics romp where you alternate turns with the enemy, capture tiny cities and bases, get into rock, paper, scissors fights, and deploy commander powers once your meter is charged up. Each commander, at least initially, has two powers to pick from at the start of a mission, from powering up your hybrids to calling reinforcements.

I didn't actually get to use my favourite power, as it belonged to a Martian commander (they'll be playable in PvP). This cosmic interloper mutated a bunch of his basic troops, turning their heads into bombs. Pretty dastardly, honestly. Is the Martian military cool with this? Is he going to be facing a tribunal after the war is over? Who can say. These bomb-heads then just sauntered up to my Geneva-Convention-adhering troops and went kaboom. Nasty stuff.

Otherwise, it's all pretty perfunctory and familiar.

Creature feature

When I was commanding my hybrids, outside of their special abilities, like bonking enemies back a few squares or spitting out acid, they functioned just like any other unit—but worse, because at least it's fun to watch an artillery barrage wipe out a bunch of floating sci-fi tanks, whereas it's a bit less exciting to watch someone in what looks like a bad rhino costume slap an alien.

And if you're thinking, "Hold on, a rhino-man slapping an alien actually sounds like something I'd like to see", I feel you, but you'd be wrong. Technically they just slap the air in front of them, and the aliens take some damage. It's not something you need to see more than once.

Not that I got to spend much time controlling my hybrids anyway, because in the available missions I was only able to bring a maximum of two; the rest of the time, I was just commanding generic units—each of them simple and one-note.

I was hoping for more weird nonsense. More character. At the very least, rummy mars I'd love to see some shit-talking between the opposing commanders. The premise is just so inherently silly, it makes it all the more jarring when the game is so conservative.

This extends to the missions themselves. I only got my hands on a few, and they failed to showcase any real novelties. Two of them tasked me with wiping out the enemy or capturing their HQ. One had no wrinkles whatsoever, while the second one shook things up a bit by including some fog of war. Not exactly a game changer. The other was a territory capture race where victory is effectively handed to you.

What I really missed during these missions was the sense that each was a bespoke puzzle, where every move has weight and risk—something Advance Wars nails. There was no need to come up with a strategy of any kind. You just push forward, recruit more units and overwhelm the enemy.

The closest it came to requiring a plan was in the aforementioned fog of war mission. The fog had so little impact it might as well have not been there at all, since the enemy commander is so predictable you really don't need to see what they're doing. This commander's ability, Invasion, summons flying units. And once it has enough cities under its control, it can start to recruit even more flying units—which cost quite a bit. So I stopped churning out infantry and tanks, switched to anti-air and helicopters, and it just couldn't adapt.

This mission was a puzzle in the same way a game of rock, paper, scissors where you know your opponent will always pick rock is a puzzle. Not remotely, then.

I don't want to write off a game based just on three presumably early missions—but this is how Relic is introducing the world to Earth vs Mars. It's also releasing the demo publicly on July 25. This is likely what's going to determine how many people slap it onto their wishlists—apparently the only important metric these days. And it's left me not especially eager to play more.

There's still something here, though. I love the Splice-O-Tron, and the actual design of the maps is solid if uninspired—chokepoints, water hazards, varied terrain—but from Relic I've come to expect more. This is one of the most important studios in strategy gaming, responsible for multiple legendary RTS games, and Earth vs Mars just feels so removed from that legacy.