Battle Aces Preview – Much Quicker RTS Action
Real-time strategy games need a revamp, or so developer and publisher Uncapped Games would have you believe. Their upcoming RTS game Battle Aces promises just that, with quick match times, deck building, NO resource collecting, and other ideas that really turn the genre on its head in some aspects. MP1st went hands-on with this upcoming game, and have our impressions ready now.
Uncapped Potential?
Uncapped Games has a mission to reinvent a stalwart genre of gaming. These days, if you want to play a game but only have 15 minutes or so, you usually opt for something that can be played quickly. RTS games are rarely on any list of potential games you might come up with for such a limited amount of time. But that’s one of the main draws of Battle Aces – it promises to get you into the action quickly, and also guarantees that if you only have 15 minutes or less (including launching the game, configuring settings/units, and matchmaking), then you have enough time to play a full game of Battle Aces.
You see, a match in Battle Aces is, at most, precisely ten minutes long. In case you’re unaware, that’s extremely quick in a genre that tends to have matches that take many times longer to conclude. This is facilitated by having all players automatically earn resources at a fixed rate. An entire phase of the RTS genre has been put out to pasture in Battle Aces, as there are no resources to collect. With supply levels putting everyone on equal footing, each match thus becomes a battle of pure strategy.
I grew up around the same time as Command & Conquer becoming popular. I played the hell out of those games, a bit of StarCraft, and even some Warfare Inc. on my Palm Pilot. All of these games, even the mobile version, pitted players against one another in games that always began with each commander collecting resources as quickly as they could. Occasionally, the location chosen to explore wouldn’t yield as many resources as you’d like, and sometimes it could feel unfair when the opposing army happened to find better resources, usually in higher numbers to boot. So, the removal of this aspect of an RTS keeps things a little bit fairer, and it has the added effect of really speeding things up.
So Many Strategies, Such Little Time
Does it speed things up a bit too much, though? That’s a tough question, one that I don’t think was completely answered during my time with Battle Aces. Some matches were over in perhaps as few as five minutes – if you happen to get paired with a player who knows the optimum strategies, you’ll quickly find yourself on the losing end of the fight. Skill-based match making (SBMM) will obviously be important here, though it was of course not in play during our time with the game.
Do you save up your resources to invest in another operating base? Or do you choose to make more advanced upgrades to your existing strongholds? Perhaps you say nuts to all that, and simply load up on all the basic units you can afford, in an effort to be the first to launch an assault, in the hopes that your enemy has hardly built up much in the way of defenses. Each of these strategies is just as valid as the next, and thanks to the short match length, experimenting with different units and plans is easy to do, with results you can take action on from every match.
Deck building is an aspect of Battle Aces that not very many RTS games feature. Each player can only choose eight units that they can build in a match, across three tiers that get progressively stronger (and progressively costlier, as well), from four categories which are effective against while category while ineffective against another, as is common in many games involving any sort of strategy.
CPU – Can Pwn You (If You’re Not Careful)
During our time with Battle Aces, we managed to play against other people online, but also in the co-operative mode which lets two human players take on the AI. In fact, this was the first mode I tried. My teammate and I got absolutely slaughtered in our first match, as the computer-controlled commander didn’t hold back at all. So, I settled into a couple of 1-vs-1 matches, ready to lose but also learn at the same time. After a couple of matches against other players, I ventured back out into the co-op mode. This time, instead of just building a bunch of low-level units, I put resources into building a secondary base for backup, alongside leveling up my build capabilities to the second tier, which I would follow up with an upgrade to the highest tier as the game reached the end phase. My teammate seemed to have a similar strategy in mind, which felt encouraging. The result was a decisive victory for us, at well under the ten minute mark, too.
One aspect of Battle Aces that is sure to cause differing opinions is its approach to season passes. It’ll have a battle pass, with both free and premium tiers. Unlike a lot of freemium games which only reward cosmetic items to premium season passes in order to avoid becoming pay-to-win, currently some of the game’s 50 unit types appear to be locked behind such a paywall. Uncapped Games says they are open and transparent when it comes to community feedback, so if that’s true, and the concept of functional pieces of the game being locked away to only those who cough up the dough is unappealing to gamers, then it’ll be up to the community to raise those issues with the developer.
Battle Aces is an interesting, fast-paced real-time strategy game that you can play in just a few minutes. It’s also very punishing if you happen to be on the receiving end of a player’s successful strategy. It’s certainly a more approachable version of a classic genre, but is that what fans want? Time will tell when Battle Aces releases sometime next year.
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