Verdict: SunAge turns back the clock to 1997.
The trouble with trying to develop a game single-handed is that technology has a nasty habit of going faster than you. This is exactly what happened to Roman Pfneudl, the man behind SunAge. In 1996, when he conceived the concept of a post-apocalyptic real-time strategy game, Command & Conquer was king and RTS games were very 2D. Therefore, a 3D game would really push the envelope.
Fast forward 11 years and SunAge is the final result. The game is an isometric pseudo-3D RTS - in reality, a 2D game making good use of sprites and pixel art, despite being rendered in Direct3D - that has three factions fighting in a desperate war for survival. For a 2D game, it looks good and the particle effects are reasonable. The trouble is that the game has missed its window of opportunity; Age of Empires was doing this in 1997.
As you've probably gathered, this game is about as old-school as it gets - there's a lot of resource-collecting, construction, pumping out units at a rate of knots and zerging. If this was a game from a well-established multinational publisher, we'd be lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks. However, it isn't. What's more, the game has a reasonable price tag. So is it actually worth buying?
The game comprises three different campaigns that follow the war from each protagonist's point of view. The Federation represents the last vestiges of humanity, while The Raak-Zun are the outcasts who have had to fend for themselves in a radioactive wasteland - any similarity to Mad Max is purely coincidental. Finally, there's a race of robots called The Sentinel. Each race has its own unique set of units, racial advantages and Achilles heel. Like StarCraft, you have to play through each campaign in turn before unlocking the next.
The game is almost exclusively controlled using the mouse, although some of the hotspots aren't exactly obvious. More annoyingly, you can only highlight units of one particular type, rather than creating a mixed force, so you end up having to criss-cross the map, repeatedly moving units. Compounding this is some rather dodgy path-finding. Hopefully, by the time you read this, the promised patch addressing some of these issues will have been released.
The game's missions are quite long - it took us two hours just to complete a single map - although much of that time was taken up with base building and assembling a massive army, before directing the final assault. There's also a dedicated server set up for online play, although it suffers from lag at times.
SunAge is isometric, has zero new technology, and will leave your graphics card running at room temperature waiting for something to do. However, despite its antiquated appearance, SunAge is still fun. Whether you're a strategy aficionado who thinks that the late 1990s was the golden age of the RTS genre, or just have a passing interest in old-school styles, there are worse games that you can buy for £20 (such as Thrillville: Off the Rails).
