In my game, I chose to beef up the health and special powers of my mages. While the drops are random, the one or the other choice at the end of each level does allow you to clumsily build a certain kind of army for each faction. You pick one and move on to the next mission (since you will play as every faction over the course of multiplayer and campaign modes, the bonuses and items you get can apply to any of the three factions).
Every time that you finish a single player campaign mission, you are given a choice of two artifacts. This might not sound like much, but the mechanic is built into every bit of Worldshift. This alien artifact adds to all of your healers’ powers, or perhaps, it boosts the damage of your Guardians (large, floating leader creatures). Much more sensible is the army-wide approach. With so many units (it’s not quite Starcraft but in a multiplayer or single player match, you will have tens and tens of units, using 6 to 7 basic unit templates), there really isn’t much point to investing in unit-specific items and loot. When you first encounter these items, the clarity of Crytek Black Sea’s purpose becomes clear. Instead, you will find items that add to the health, power, or versatility of one of your units. You won’t find a gem or glyph that upgrades your fireball skill. These come in the form of miniscule upgrades to your “skills.” These skills in turn are nothing like typical RPG abilities. You’ll also collect, bit by bit, pieces of loot. You’ll escort, guard, explore, and conquer all in the name of something mystical and futuristic. More importantly, you play through twenty or so missions that teach you all that you need to know about Worldshift. Trust me the latter is by far the more rewarding path.Īs you play, you shepherd along a gang of completely forgettable space-fantasy types. The much more sensible path involves treating the main campaign as a glorified leveling and item-collection exercise.
That is, they are in store for the player who treats this like a game with a story. Tribal leaders, grand warlords, mysterious aliens, and more completely unexpected characters, races, and “plot twists” are in store for the attentive player. It’s a world that reminds one of Warhammer (in that Warhammer has, and always will have, thinly veiled orcs and elves in space), albeit through a softer, European lens. Essentially, “primitive” humans, Zerg-like things, and mechanized humans live in a universe that leans a bit more toward sci-fi than it does toward fantasy. It takes a huge amount of effort to involve oneself to any degree in the machinations of this world. The world of Worldshift is highly derivative. Worldshift may not stray as much into RPG territory as I might like, but it weaves together the RTS and the RPG in a likable, if somewhat fiddly, fantasy sci-fi package. Warcraft 3 made this design mishmash both successful and popular and Relic has (surprisingly, given their strong RTS background) approached the issue from the opposite direction, producing a wonderful squad-based tactical RPG that only slipped into “full” RTS mode in multiplayer. It is by no means alone in this category. While I think that it’s the former, Worldshift is obviously a game that started as an RTS with upgradeable, leveling odds and ends and not the other way around. Depending on who you talk to, RPGs may be seeping into games everywhere, or RTSs may be doing the same.
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