http://greygoo.greybox.com/info/faq/
WHAT IS GREY GOO?
Grey Goo is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) video game that pits three unique factions against each other in a war for survival. The game takes place on a fictional planet known as Planet Nine, and the campaign centers around the story of how these factions come into contact with each other and their struggle for co-existance.
WHO IS MAKING GREY GOO?
Petroglyph Games, whose staff pedigree includes games like Dune II, Command and Conquer, and Empire at War, is handling primary development on Grey Goo. Honestly, who better to make a classic-inspired RTS than some of the very people who invented the genre?
The game is being published by Grey Box.
http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/grey-goo-preview/
Rob Zacny wrote:More management, less micro
The first thing I notice as I sit down to play Grey Goo is that the controls are all based off of the QWERTY row on your keyboard, like a MOBA.
While most RTS hotkeys can be extremely esoteric, Grey Goo uses a simple tiered menu system. So you have a choice of producing buildings, light units, heavies, air—and once you key into that next submenu, you get a new set of options using the same keys. With practice, it becomes fast and effortless.
“That whole synergy between base-building, economic control, and unit production is really important,” lead designer Andrew Zoboki says. “When you're focusing on combat, we don't want you to have to snap the screen back and forth for unit production.”
I spend most of my time with Grey Goo's meat-and-potatoes faction, the Beta. They're an industrial alien race, with beefy builds and an extra set of small, nimble hands. Tactically speaking, they establish outposts across the map and fight with heavy armor and artillery.
Another, more futuristic race employs a different dynamic, connecting everything to a central hub. They have to play a Tetris-like expansion game of laying down conduit, planting new structures, and teleporting existing structures closer to the front line.
While there's a lot of faction asymmetry in Grey Goo, Zoboki says the team tried to avoid having too many “hard counters” in the game. Instead, the idea is to keep evolving your unit composition in response to what you're encountering on the battlefield. Advantage accrues to the player that keeps making the right adjustments to the mix of units and combat tactics.
Throwbacks
Grey Goo plays like a lavishly produced, fundamentally simple RTS. That's good in some ways. However, there are also moments it feels perhaps too much like a return to the good old days. The units were so versatile that army size, not composition, seemed like the deciding factor.
The maps are gloriously lavish, like playing at RTS set in the world of Avatar, but they are also predominantly decorative. The most interesting visual elements are used to demarcate unplayable space, and much of the warfare plays out in open clearings or narrow chokes. Given how the different factions use the map, that may not be such a problem, but the terrain feels almost tactically featureless.
On the other hand, we’ve played games with ever more sophistication and complexity that appeal to a demanding competitive audience for years now. Different terrain types, modular unit design, special abilities... all of these things reward players whose minds work at a few hundred actions-per-minute.
But that's not most people. It never was. The RTS genre was built in part by games like Grey Goo: where players gathered resources, built an army, and then tried to blast through enemies to get at their base and harvesters. Grey Goo is remarkable not for what it has added to the RTS formula, but what it has stripped away.
Teaser Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMRsic7dYAY
The final paragraphs of the PC Gamer preview fail to inspire confidence, but the screenshots certainly look nice.
