Battle of Atlantis

Hold on: Another attempt to uncover the mysteries of Atlantis? And we thought Indy put that riddle to bed years ago. No, there’s very little mystery with this one – it’s a Command & Conquer-baiting RTS title with shades of Fracture thrown in for good measure. The idea is that the seas are rising, not because of global warming, but because the ancient submariner race of Atlantans are terraforming the planet to their own tastes. Us land-dwellers are the one thing standing in the way of them turning the whole planet into one enormous funpool.

Pay attention though: they’re not aliens, they’re Atlantans. Well, they’re called Aquoses here. The whole game will take place on this planet, but you’ll be waging war mainly on land, but also in the air and of course, ‘under da sea’. The wet armies will control floods, tidal waves etc, and us plucky land-dwellers will use all our resources to send ‘em back to the depths. Very like Fracture, you’ll be able to carve up each map to suit your tactics, raising and lowering the battlefield, and then diverting or avoiding water and floods, depending on which faction you’re controlling.

Well, ‘controlling’ is the key word here, bearing in mind how crap all 360 RTS controls have been. Erm… bit of a sore point. Having been hands-on with an early build of the game, we were assured that Atlantis would be controlled ‘just like every other RTS on the 360’. So unless you really got into the swing of the last few Command & Conquer outings, this may not be for you.

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Well, you’ve got the best part of a year to make your mind up – World Forge and Play Ten Interactive don’t have an eye on release until Q3 of next year… And indeed they’ve got that amount of time to try something genre-bustingly innovative with the control system. Already the extra complexity of waging war above and below the waves, as well as in the air, could be something to get real strategy fans salivating. Could be.

Nov 26, 2008