The Indie Video Game Report: Grey Goo
The Indie Report is a series where I take the time to delve the crags and crevices of the indie game market to bring you the down low on the most promising/disastrous indie titles.
This is a bit of a stretch to call “indie,” because Grey Goo came out with a $50 price tag. Still, it is the studio’s first game and published by notorious peddlers of shit Petroglyph, and caught my eye with an interesting premise. A strategy game in the ilk of Starcraft, the game promised asymmetric gameplay across three different teams. Asymmetry isn’t a new concept in strategy, but Grey Goo goes beyond the pale by introducing a team that doesn’t build bases. The titular Grey Goo instead uses resources to spawn roaming “Mother Goo” that suck up resource nodes and splinter off units. The goo grows, with units being judged as parts of mass. I was eager to see if Petroglyph released a game that wasn’t crap for once, and emailed their company asking for a review copy.
3 weeks later, they finally got back to me. It was a rocky start, but I was still eager to see what the game had to offer. I’m glad I did, because Grey Goo has proven a worthy contender in the strategy game wars that will always be won by Starcraft. The game is fast and polished, and should prove entertaining to anyone who is looking for an alternative to Starcraft.
I don’t want to spend the whole review talking about Starcraft, but the comparison is the easiest way to describe the game. There are fewer units than in Starcraft, and bases are easier to build with fewer components. It is similarly easy to learn and hard to master, with a significant emphasis on micro. Units all serve a specific role effectively, with anti-air, artillery, tanks, infantry, anti-armor, and air support all being pretty self explanatory. There are a few interesting units per faction, like a Goo unit that can taunt nearby enemies and a Beta unit that can stealth. What is really cool are the upgrades. Each team can research one of three technologies in three different categories. You can only research one of each category per game, but they provide significant modifications to units. Researching the upgrade for the anti-air unit can allow it to attack ground units, while upgrading the stealth unit will give it a group cloak while stationary. Getting the correct upgrade at a crucial moment can game changing.
As for the diversity in teams, the Beta and Humans play similarly, while the Goo is a differnt beast. Beta build bases off of different sized “hubs”, with small providing 2 build points, medium 4, and large 6. What you have attached to a hub dictates what that hub can build. Small hubs are best suited for harvest nodes near resource points, while large can chain together a bunch of tech buildings to pump out high tier units. You can slap a bunch of large factories on a medium hub and pump out wave after wave of base unit, and it is an interesting give and take between production units and tech buildings.
The Humans play similarly, but have more robust networks out of their main hubs. The build networks of connectors that attach to buildings. Creating walls is a much bigger part of their play style, as their units can pass through their laser walls uninhibited. They have access to more interesting tactical buildings, such as a teleporter that can send clumps of units anywhere you have sight. Though similar to the Beta, their bases are more robust and with fewer expansions.
The Goo, on the other hand, are a different beast. As was previously mentioned, the Goo splinter off into units. As a result, there is a greater variety of tactics the Goo can implore, but in general their expansions are faster but harder to defend. Without any static defences, they rely heavily on a swarm of hit and run units to defend their various mothers. They are probably the most difficult faction to play, and it is difficult to gauge how they are doing in a match. The Goo can also move over impassable terrain, adding an extra element of strategy to their unending horde.
Each team has access to a super unit, which take minutes to build and thousands of resources. The Goo builds a primordial goo pile that wrecks buildings with artillery aoe damage. The humans build a deadly but vulnerable walker, that can decimate armies with a line damage laser. The Beta have the most versatile super unit, a flying ship that allows units to mount inside it for different configurations of damage. Super units have been a treat for me since Dawn of War, and it is always satisfying to build one of these unwieldy game changers.
The in game graphics are a bit of a letdown. Units lack the polish we have come to expect, but on a macro scale it all looks good. Factories put together the units piece by piece, and when the goo splits off into its parts it forms and shapes fluidly. On the other hand, the cutscenes are incredibly beautiful, with CGI for the Beta race that seems to defy the uncanny valley. It is a pleasure to play the campaign just to see the briefing screens, which is something I thought I would never say.
All said and done, Grey Goo will be a title that either appeals to you or doesn’t, which is a statement that requires a bit of explanation. For some backstory, I had played 82 hours of Total War: Attila 7 days after the game came out. I played easily 400 hours of Rome 2, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 hours of Dawn of War 2. I fucking love tactical strategy games, but I put maybe 5 hours into Starcraft 2. The twitch based and micro heavy strategy games have never appealed to me, so I am not exactly the most qualified person to comment on Grey Goo. I will never be good at the game, and what I feel about the balance will very unlikely be in line with the meta.
That all being said, I really enjoyed Grey Goo. It seems it will forever be doomed to be an odd little blip on the map that is the gaping maw of Starcraft’s industry dominance, but it still entertained someone who doesn’t normally like these games. It is standard micro strategy, but with some unique enough twists to compel me to keep playing.
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