Boid is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Mokus and published by tinyBuild. And it’s a strange one. Especially given the fact that I am terrible at RTS games.
My usual approach to these sorts of games isn’t exactly the best, where it’s applicable at all. Boid isn’t the usual sort of RTS where sitting back and amassing your army to crush your opponent with sheer numbers is a great plan. It encourages, and often requires, you to send your army out and obtain rapid dominance over your enemy.
Extra important considering that every spawner and trainer removes that option for the other side, and once you capture all of the spawners, you win. Well, with the exception of levels where you need to get to the end of an area with limited units. Which require a degree of forethought and planning to survive.
Each of the unit classes has its purpose. Outside of the initial blank slates, each of the primary classes run on a rock-paper-scissors system. Crabs take out scouts, scouts take out gunners, and gunners take out crabs. This is important, since only one ranged and one melee unit can engage another unit at a time, meaning your numbers only need to be marginally larger than an opponent’s to succeed. And since your goal is to quickly take out enemy spawners, it benefits you to make small groups with enough of each type of unit to handle a situation and send them out while you make more.
There are a few levels that have secondary goals. They usually boil down to something like keeping a certain unit around until the end, or finishing the level in a certain (short) amount of time. I’m absolutely terrible at the game, so I found the time crunch difficult to deal with. What I really mean by all of this is that Boid is an RTS stripped down to its essentials, and then it builds from there. There aren’t any crazy branching trees, or a massive host of powers. You send your units to a trainer, they become that type of unit, regardless of what they were before.
The story concerns terraforming. Specifically, the Human Race’s attempt to become the first multi-planet race in existence. To do so, they created drones containing terraforming units called Boids. They work from the basics of life to rearrange the planet at the microorganism level.
Unfortunately, one of these crash landed on a planet that already had the beginnings of life in place, creating an ecological disaster of greater than Exxon Valdez proportions. As the only person in the area with a ship capable of remotely controlling the drone to set things to rights, you’ve been drafted and ordered to sort the whole mess out.
The graphics are similar to other games concerning microorganisms such as Flow. They are a bit more colorful, though. And while it’s easy to get mixed up on which units are which in the heat of things, you can usually figure it out thanks to their different profiles.
The soundtrack struck me as fairly ambient overall so there isn’t much to talk about. I will say that their choice of sound effects is nice. The sound units make when being selected is either delightful or irritating, depending on how well you’ve been doing.
Boid also has a multiplayer mode. That is likely where much of the game lies; I decided not to venture into it, though, due to my feeling as though I wouldn’t exactly be up to snuff. I will, however, note that the multiplayer is free. I don’t really know what that actually means in the grand scheme of things; whether it has free servers, or simply uses Steam’s native matchmaking. But it is worthy of note.
For a free to play game, Boid is a good choice. It doesn’t look like other strategy games on the market, true, but that doesn’t really count against it. If you’re only concerned about strategy and you don’t really want things to be complicated, you can do worse than Boid. There are plenty of RTS games that cost actual money yet don’t have half the level of polish Boid has.
Pros:
+ Simple, easy to follow controls
+ Extensive tutorial
+ It does things different
Cons:
– Can be easy to mix up units
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
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