I’m currently playing a lot of Rusted Warfare, an RTS game from a small Indie developer named Luke. Since the nineties I’ve always been a great fan of real time strategy games. Back then I played Command & Conquer (1995), Seven Kingdoms (1997) and Warcraft 2 (1995) with it’s clean graphics but what really blew me away was Total Annihilation (1997).
Later games like Supreme Commander (2007) and more recently Beyond All Reason (BAR) expanded on the idea of Total Annihilation. BAR is open source but it looks and plays incredible. Unfortunately it only plays on modern PC’s with good graphics cards because of the 3d graphics and numerous units on a map. It lacks some of the sophistication that BAR has in terms of gameplay. On the other hand it plays on humble PC’s and the graphics are actually quite good. Like Supreme Commander and BAR it has infinite zoom and the exciting experimental units.
It also has endless replayability capability because of an easy to use modding system and the ability to create your own maps. I should also mention the sandbox editor that lets you create your own scenario. Apparently the developers Luke is still working on the game with updates every two years or so. Also the community is very active with hundreds of mods and maps. Some of the mods address game balance, which is nice, others provide complete make-overs and are inspired by old RTS games such as Dune II and Command and Conquer.
I’ve playing around with the modding system which is basically a set of configuration files in combination with graphics, music and sound that need to be added to the game. I really enjoyed making a simple mod just to see if I could get it to work (which it did).
Rusted Warfare is available on Steam for 4,99 euro.