EARTH VS MARS

Advance Wars spliced with Impossible Creatures

- Fraser Brown

An acclaimed - albeit struggling - RTS studio developing a cute turn-based tactics game full of retro sci-fi Martians and animal soldiers sounds like one of those terrible April Fools' not-jokes that inundate my beleaguered inbox every April 1. But Relic's Earth Vs Mars is very real.

Relic takes big swings. Homeworld still feels like a groundbreaking RTS more than 25 years after it launched. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes pushed the troubled RTS genre forward at a time when most 3D strategy games were falling on their faces.

Even when it misses, I still find myself a captive general, eagerly diving into battle after battle. Company of Heroes 3's dynamic campaign was a mess at launch, but it had so much promise and still held within it a seemingly infinite number of genuinely thrilling, complex RTS brawls full of novelties and smart ideas. This was not remotely obvious during my first taste of Earth Vs Mars.

CREATURE FEATURE

What we've got is Advance Wars with a bit of Relic's own Impossible Creatures. OK, here's the deal: Mars has invaded, and a generic Earth military force needs to put a stop to this nonsense with tanks, helicopters, soldiers and that sort of thing.

The Martians have some weird sci-fi gizmos, but so does Earth: specifically, the Splice-O-Tron, which lets you splice humans with up to three different animals - from a final roster of ten - to create bespoke supersoldiers. I only had access to three: a fly, cheetah and rhino.

Impossible Creatures gave us 76 critters to splice, but