Silverfisk

0 comments by Silverfisk on Aug 5th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

Hive Rise is a free MMORTS, which is something you don’t see much of. And apart from most free MMO games this one is actually pretty good! It's made by the young German company Vulcando Games who also have made a few other cool games I've never heard of before.

Everything in Hive Rise is simple, there are two resource types, three types of unit factories with 3-5 units each and a big ‘GO!’ button on the main menu to get you right into the action. The battlefield is a repeating pattern of 1024 hexagon shaped bases, and it’s in the desert. I could go into depth about what units are good against what and so on, but I don’t need to, it’s really that simple!

Like the trend suggests, this title is supported by micro transactions. You can use your real money to buy fictional money to buy upgrades like air strikes, being able to call in reinforcements and being able to see who your opponent is (yes, you can’t see your opponent’s name unless you buy this upgrade).

If you’re a hard core gamer who likes to work hard for your upgrades you can always just play the game. You get 100 coins for 10 minutes of play, the cheapest upgrade costs 48 000 coins. That’s 80 hours of MMORTSing to be able to permanently see what the name of your enemy is (the expensive stuff costs more than 200 000 coins). Luckily, 3 days and 30 days versions are also available for all upgrades, so for the price of 1 500 coins you can see the name of your adversaries for three days, sounds fair.

This part is something I don’t really understand the point of just yet, before each battle you get to select a play mode. At the start you can only choose ‘hive master’, this is the normal play mode. when you’ve got 300 000 score points you unlock three new play modes to choose from and at 500 000 you unlock the last three. When a battle is over you get a trophy that gets shinier the more score you got during the round. But I have no idea why I would want these trophies, especially when some of the play modes are simply restricting you to either infantry, aircraft or tanks.

Each game lasts for 10 minutes, so when you’ve pressed the big ‘GO!’ button and selected a play mode you’ll get right to the game. But before you get to destroy stuff you have 30 seconds to prepare, hopefully you’ll be spending this time on building your resource buildings and getting your first units out the factories. After those 30 seconds you need to pray that no one was waiting with his massive army right outside the door, ready to rip anything behind those steel doors to shreds as soon as they open.

While the time is ticking you should try attacking your enemies to capture their bases, this is done Battlefield style, by putting a unit next to the flag in the middle of the base. If you survive the 10 minutes, all of your units and buildings will explode and you’ll be presented with your score and trophy. If you did something remarkable like exploring a whole lot, getting a lot of resources or becoming defeated extremely fast you’ll also get a cool sticker reward. You can slap this sticker onto the locker next to your trophy locker, where you also can admire your beautiful trophies, amazing.

Other than the big ‘GO!’ button, you can play via the lobby. There are four different ways to play from the lobby,  you can co-operate with up to three friends on the public battlefield (doing this you will all wipe the floor with the competition, guaranteed). You can also just start next to each other on the battlefield, but without being on the same team. There are also the classic deathmatch and team deathmatch modes on instanced arenas with up to 64 players and 100 hex bases.

The game is fairly balanced and free from bugs, the graphics are nothing fancy so even older computers should be able to run the game fine. The thing I’m missing in this is a more defined objective and not only ‘than kill as much as you can to get an as high score as you can’. Maybe add some special super bases that everyone wants, to give the game some spice at least. Because as much fun this game is right now, I’m having a hard time seeing how this will appeal to people in the long run if nothing is done about this.

All in all Hive Rise delivers a very solid experience, it’s got lots of neat stuff like the stickers, a nice interface, almost no lag and above all it's got simple gameplay. The pathfinding isn’t great but I’m guessing they had to do some heavy optimizing to be able to take 1000 players, at least my units don’t get stuck. I didn’t run into a single bug during my play time today and both me and my friend had a great time. It’s free and it’s a small download so it’s not like you’ve got anything to loose.
Get to it

Originally posted on The Human Pond.
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