Future men have gone back in time to the Civil War in order to change history so that the South will win the war! That’s the premise of a new indie game from Radioactive Software. Falling into the category of “I wanted to like this game”, Gettysburg Armored Warfare has a terrific concept and some great moments, but this project by a one-man dev team doesn’t live up to the potential of its concept.
From an aesthetic perspective, it does many things well; voice overs from commanders speak like distinguished Confederate gentlemen, or God-damned Yankees. They use 19th Century colloquialisms, and in the background players will hear period music like When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Units have cool steampunk looks, including gatling guns, and exosuits. Tanks and armored vehicles will fight alongside horse-mounted cavalry units, combat blimps roam the skies and those new-fangled “Ironclad” ship patrol the seas.
Players can command these units from a Real Time Strategy overhead view, or they can take direct control of any particular unit to fight as a Third Person Shooter (Letting AI control all of the other units while in Third Person mode). The mechanics of a strategy game are present too, players have varying types of units that compete to capture strategic points on the map, much like the Battlefield games. Some units are fast but weak, others are slow and powerful. Capturing and holding these points, while killing enemies is how the game is won or lost.
This can result in some fun emergent play as tanks blast horses into showers of blood, or naval units duke it out to control the narrow waterways, but there are a few big problems with Gettysburg.
First, it’s almost entirely based on online multiplayer. There’s an offline mode where players can practice against AI bots, but there isn’t a tutorial or a story-based campaign. Gamers who aren’t already strategy fans will certainly have trouble figuring out what they’re supposed to do, and the AI fights aren’t interesting enough to keep players coming back.
Although it’s designed for a whopping sixty-four players to fight in each match, an online community has not yet formed as of this writing. It’s very difficult to find even a single opponent online, let alone the full experience of 63 other players in a single match. With units mostly being controlled by AI, it gets boring very quickly. Tanks can annihilate many other units with a single shot, and AI isn’t very good at defending itself, so the Third Person battles are quickly reduced to a simple, Dominant Strategy: “Get in Tank. Kill everything”.
There’s a Deathmatch Mode in which players can’t issue orders to their units at all, and play entirely in the Third Person mode, but this isn’t really a bonus mode, it just removes the strategy aspects of the game, making it much less interesting.
There is a great game hidden inside Gettysburg Armored Warfare. It’s not hard to image the sort of fun that could happen with a full server. Perhaps a series of updates will make it a more interesting single-player experience, thereby drawing in more people to participate in the multiplayer battles.
The developer does show a great deal of promise, but as it is, there is very little to enjoy beyond the amusing premise.
The concept was interesting, but sad to see the game fell short. Here’s hoping to see improvements. Very well written review and article.