umanity has some serious survival issues. Faced with extinction or whatever (I wasn't quite sure), they must travel through a series of time-dimensional gate thingies in order to survive. What, they can't just build a rocket or something? Anyway, along the way, humanity (aka the player) must battle not only rival human factions but also an alien entity known as the Scourge. Such is the story behind Codemaster's real-time strategy game Perimeter.
Players control several of the human factions as they hop through the single-player campaign. To Perimeter's credit, each of the scenarios and "worlds" on which players battle feels different. One may be verdant hills, filled with foliage, while another might be windswept desert. In most missions, gamers need to terraform land (a big deal), build bases and produce units. Typical real-time strategy gruel.
What is less than typical is Perimeter's focus on terraforming and nanotechnology. Land must be transformed into a tablelike surface to support a base's power cores; hence the need to terraform. And once your robotic army has been manufactured, you may use nanotechnology to morph the robots into different units that suit the task at hand.
Perimeter sports two multiplayer modes, deathmatch and team deathmatch. In both the goal is to wipe out the opposition, and both may be played via local area network or over the Internet.
Innovation isn't everything
Sure, Perimeter is an innovative slice of real-time strategy. The terraforming idea is cool—not as cool as a clever new weapon, but cool nonetheless. And although the idea of combining units to make new units has been used before, the whole nanotechnology concept is pretty neat. But does all the innovation make a great game?
Not really.
You see, bulldozing and nanoteching aside, you still have the same old "build this base, crank out these units and destroy the other base" formula that has been the heart of production-based real-time strategy gaming since its inception. Yes, the wildly disparate worlds and semi-clever missions are nice, but at the end of the day you are still stuck at the keyboard, clicking away as you try to destroy the enemy base. It's frequently a war of attrition and a war of boredom, and, to make matters worse, there are the perimeters after which the game is named. These are invulnerable but require more energy than your stations can make. Hence the field may be raised only for a short amount of time. Accordingly, when you're attacking an enemy base the artificial intelligence will raise the shield, repair its units and make ready for your next onslaught. Yes, you can eventually fight your way through it, but it takes what is frequently the weakest part of RTS gaming—i.e., destroying the enemy base—and makes it even more tedious.
On the upside, Perimeter is a beautiful game. Laser bolts zip colorfully across well-detailed terrain, and the units are well animated. Unfortunately, the nice graphics come at a price. It takes about a three-gigabyte processor to run the game well, and not everyone has one those lying around.
Perimeter is certainly worth your time, if for no other reason than the wow factor. It is cool, it is innovative, and it is eye-poppingly beautiful. On the downside, all that does little to hide a real-time strategy formula that has grown too long in the tooth.
It's real different, it's real pretty, but it's not real fun.
— Mark
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