Rusted Warfare (Linux, Mac, Android, Windows)

[Huw the Poo]

Rusted Warfare, by Corroding Games, is an RTS clearly inspired by Command & Conquer, Dune 2000 and the like.  Since I bought it for a stupidly low price it has been the game most regularly played by my Saturday night gaming group.  We've been known to have conversations like:

"Shall we have just a quick game of something"
"Yeah, how about Rusted Warfare?"

...or...

"What long game shall we play this evening then?
"Let's play Rusted Warfare!"

As you can see from the screenshots on the Steam page, it's graphically primitive, but this comes with advantages; the frequent updates almost always bring new units, and just as excitingly, there's a very high cap on the number of units in a single game.

Rusted Warfare plays just as you'd expect.  Everyone starts with a command centre, and from there you build builder units, who in turn plant refineries to increase income along with land/sea/air/mech/experimental factories to churn out your combat units.  The minimal interface is largely devoid of frills but doesn't get in your way at all, and everything is clearly laid out.

Gameplay is quite fast.  You plonk your refineries down on fixed locations that are map-dependent, build some factories and defenses, and within a couple of minutes you're sending your first sorties against your enemies.  The included maps are pretty varied and incorporate large, small and medium, as well as water-heavy maps for the naval fans and even lava-based maps (lava is impassable to all but air units).

You can turtle if that's your thing.  In fact the last couple of updates introduced tier 3 defensive turrets which, when built in quantities, make your base nigh-impregnable to all but the most powerful hardware.  Oh yes, hardware.  All the units you'd expect are included - tanks, battleships, subs, bombers, gunships, etc.  Rusted Warfare also includes mechs which are basically another tier of land units, and experimental units.  The experimentals are kind of shameless to be honest, for example one of them is the "experimental spider" seen in Supreme Commander.  But they're a joy to use nevertheless, my favourite being the Flying Fortress which is a tough, fat old bird capable of carrying a lot of units but also being a (very fast) builder itself.  You can launch full-on invasions with these beauties; send an empty fortress on its way to your enemy, give it some build orders, and by the time it lands you have an army ready to roll out.

Oh and yes, there are nukes, which can be disabled at the start of the game if you like.  I'm not allowed to have nukes enabled in my games any more, because my friends got tired of either being nuked into oblivion, or having to divert considerable resources to building anti-nuke all the time.  They felt it was detracting from the enjoyment of the game.  Pfft, sore losers.

There's a surprising number of tactical options thanks to the wide variety of units and buildings.  You can deploy mobile turrets at chokepoints, use combat engineers to quickly establish beachheads, build laser shields to shoot down incoming projectiles, use repair bays, and so on.

I feel like it's kind of pointless to say much more about Rusted Warfare because anyone who enjoys RTS will have played one of the many similar games and will thus know precisely what to expect already.  Suffice to say, if you're a fan of the genre, you will almost certainly like Rusted Warfare.  It's fast, it's updated regularly, it doesn't tax your PC, and it's surprisingly replete with options for such a small-budget game (it even automatically records replays).  Of course it isn't perfect and currently we're bugging the developer to add a much-needed patrol option.  There are some other quality of life issues that could be addressed too; the pathfinding isn't top-level for example, the sounds aren't great and the music is bloody awful.

The key thing about Rusted Warfare is the insane value for money.  For the price of a pint of beer you get a really fun C&C clone that's absolutely simple to pick up and play.  It even includes a lot of maps and custom missions.  Oh, and the workshop just opened up so people are now making mods for it too.  And it supports cross-platform play (I haven't played against anyone on Android yet though, I can't imagine it would be a very even match!).

Highly recommended.

[GroggyGrognard]

I just bought this off of the Steam sale. How does the multiplayer hold up?



Groggy

[Huw the Poo]

I just bought this off of the Steam sale. How does the multiplayer hold up?

If you're asking about the multiplayer community, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you; I play exclusively with my gaming group.  Mechanically, however, I can say that it's brilliant.  Everything just works the way you'd expect, and fortunately it uses the Steamworks API so you can easily invite people to games or whatever.  We play almost every week and we haven't had a single dropped connection or anything.

The only thing multiplayer is lacking, in my opinion, is a set of victory conditions.  Currently the game will only naturally end when all but one player/team has been wiped out, i.e. lost every single unit (there's a separate "player x was defeated" message which appears when a player loses the ability to build anything).  Recently I've petitioned the developer to include a game-end condition when a player loses their command centre, and it's probably going to be implemented.