Project Aftermath

When booting up Project Aftermath, you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t an indie effort. The visuals, sound effects, dialogue and cut-scenes are polished to professional standards, and the game itself is no slouch either. At first click it might appear to be a fairly standard squad-based RTS, but there are some interesting ideas here, the central one being a scoring system that is intimately tied to the difficulty level.

Before each mission you’ve got to equip your heroes with supporting troops, guns, armour, cybernetic enhancements and special abilities. Players can spend the game’s currency (‘goop’) to fully load out their characters, or keep precious goop in reserve as score instead, giving them a better chance of obtaining a silver or gold medal for the mission. However, the less-equipped your troops are, the harder it is to finish the scenario.

Crucially, using special abilities such as resurrecting units and calling down an energy blast on the battlefield also drains goop, and should it drop too low the mission’s deemed a failure. So huge battles often boil down to a balance of using powers and trying to maintain your score level, while micromanaging troops to attack those more vulnerable to their weapons (armour types are shown by a simple colour coding system). When you make the right decisions, it’s a very satisfying RTS experience.

The micromanagement doesn’t become overbearing as the battles are kept small scale. In fact, the only problems that crop up are related to the AI rather than the controls. Units can behave erratically – for example, sometimes when a squad is attacked, only half of them will return fire, while the others just stand around watching. Another bone of contention is the somewhat out of kilter weapon balance, with some disappointing upgrades towards the later levels.

While there are only ten missions, they’re reasonably diverse, varying between all-out assaults and stealth sorties. And there’s definitely replay value in trying to win those gold medals and possibly snagging a place on the online high score table.