Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising Review

You'll mostly get new AI chips when you complete a mission, but you'll never have more than ten of them. This makes you pretty much responsible for all vehicles. Rage guys are obviously action-oriented, so they gave you the possibility to assume direct control of any vehicle on field and immerge into the action segment of the game.

As for commanding your army, the game features two modes: one is classical real-time, and the other is from the Antaeus' War Room while the game is paused, where you can issue up to ten commands to each of your units. This entire command system seemed a bit messed-up... Even though you will get the first two or three missions to practice this peculiar art, the method of selecting units and issuing orders is so strange and confusing that you will need some ten missions to get semi-accustomed to it (which is about half of the game). Another irritating thing is that the developers haven't included some of the standard commands in RTS like Shift-clicking to add a unit to the selected group...

The missions are pretty standard. The first several missions are really simple and short, and are basically there to act as a sort of a tutorial for the rest of the game. They are followed by some serious battles, escort missions and scouting actions, which can be quite long. The atmosphere and difficulty will increase as you progress through the game, and the story develops better than it started with several nice twists and interesting missions, some of which also include time-limited objectives...

Finally, we come down to the engine, probably Rage's main trump in this game... In spite of the fact that everything does resemble Incoming, the developers spent three hard years working on the Antaeus Rising engine (this is not to be doubted if we know that Incoming only supported Glide). To recapitulate: the game features good smoke effects, explosion effects with an enormous number of particles (something like the explosions in Expendable) and all other possible light/fire/fog effects imaginable... The sunrises and sunsets, waves crushing against the shore and the weather changes all look quite impressive. I was pleasantly surprised at the fact that each streetlight produces a little lens-flare and that each tree can be set to fire... On the other hand, most objects in the game look pretty blocky, and they seem artificial, empty and too simple. It's like looking at objects in small, shareware 3Dgames. This can be disregarded, though, as it is nothing compared to the camera. Camera motion in this game irritated me from the very beginning, and almost made me give up the entire thing before I finished the first mission. BUT, as you would have one less review to read @ ActionTrip and as I obviously have masochistic tendencies at times, I pulled myself together and finished the first mission, and somehow got used to this game (like I got used to most games with RTS elements)... Still, I cannot believe the way they did the interface. The camera keeps running behind the vehicle in a pathetic 3rd person view with limited free-chase mod capabilities, zooming, changing FOV etc. You can well imagine how irritating this can get while you're trying to run the vehicle... I had a hell of a time trying to pilot ground vehicles about without actually seeing anything in front of me if any side object accidentally covered my view... Ughh...

There is no multiplayer support, but the developers announced that the US version would be two to three months late, which would give them the time to implement this feature. I have no idea how they plan to introduce the multiplayer mode in a game, which gives you a chance to pause it and then issue orders, without severely changing the core concept of the game.

Altogether, well Hostile Waters irritated me a bit at first... Then, I got used to it and played it enjoying it... If you want an action strategy with unique moments, and you don't mind stupid camera placement, and you're not too much into online fighting, and live in Europe, Hostile Waters is a decent choice (although this narrows down the potential fan base somewhat, doesn't it).