Posted January 22, 2010
This game started with a couple of great ideas. An RTS generally consists of three broad classes of ingredients: resources, which the players use to build and/or fuel their armies; terrain, on which the players fight; and the units making up the armies themselves. Perimeter toys with that recipe in a compelling way, blurring the lines between those three classes. The terrain itself is a resource; units can affect it; those effects can damage your opponent's units. New and interesting tactical and strategic options open up by virtue of the variety of possible terrain modifications available, to say nothing of the dizzying array of units.
The control system consists of causing groups of base units 'morph' into whatever combat unit is needed; the number of independently-controllable groups is small, only one to start with, and must be built out. It takes some getting used to, but it's a really interesting way to do things.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to really immerse yourself in this game. The ideas that make it great are let down by an at-best-mediocre implementation. The menu and intro briefing graphics are downright ugly. The in-game rendering is easy on the eyes and actually quite beautiful, but the bland unit and structure models are frustratingly difficult to tell apart. Pathfinding is quite possibly the worst in the genre. Gameplay is uniformly slow, which makes it genuinely hard to feel any excitement at all.
However, all of these complaints are forgivable for a good enough game, and Perimeter should be that good. But then there's the music. This game's music is nothing short of disastrous. Listening to it for too long gives even the most good-natured and forgiving player a strong desire to go away strangle something warm and furry. It is brain-destroyingly pain-invokingly boring, that most unpleasant kind of boring that means it just drills into your mind with a dull throb until you just can't take it anymore. And practically atonal besides.
I wish Perimeter were better. The ideas are amazing, and make for a completely different mode of tactical thought. But the presentation of those ideas is just good enough to elicit fairly high expectations, yet quite poor enough to horribly disappoint the same. Truly sad.
The control system consists of causing groups of base units 'morph' into whatever combat unit is needed; the number of independently-controllable groups is small, only one to start with, and must be built out. It takes some getting used to, but it's a really interesting way to do things.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to really immerse yourself in this game. The ideas that make it great are let down by an at-best-mediocre implementation. The menu and intro briefing graphics are downright ugly. The in-game rendering is easy on the eyes and actually quite beautiful, but the bland unit and structure models are frustratingly difficult to tell apart. Pathfinding is quite possibly the worst in the genre. Gameplay is uniformly slow, which makes it genuinely hard to feel any excitement at all.
However, all of these complaints are forgivable for a good enough game, and Perimeter should be that good. But then there's the music. This game's music is nothing short of disastrous. Listening to it for too long gives even the most good-natured and forgiving player a strong desire to go away strangle something warm and furry. It is brain-destroyingly pain-invokingly boring, that most unpleasant kind of boring that means it just drills into your mind with a dull throb until you just can't take it anymore. And practically atonal besides.
I wish Perimeter were better. The ideas are amazing, and make for a completely different mode of tactical thought. But the presentation of those ideas is just good enough to elicit fairly high expectations, yet quite poor enough to horribly disappoint the same. Truly sad.
