Howler for an Hour: Raid On Coasts

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Charem the Shadox

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Published on March 27, 2018 5:12:16 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xls4q8thFRk

Duration: 39:36

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/668830/Raid_On_Coasts/

An RTS...where the units fail to follow your commands correctly or at all.

Okay, lemme back up. To explain, I don't often play RTS games. So I'm not good at them, nor know the genre inherently in-depth. So take me with a grain of salt. Still...I think I can speak about the design decisions present here.

Let's start with content. This is in Early Access, yes...but it only has one map, and two different factions to play it as: Russia and USA. It is a different mission on that map depending on which side you pick, but this is still VERY bare-bones on content...

The Russian mission involves driving boats to a beach, deploying the boats' troops to the shore, and walking to capture one empty base with no resistance in your way, at which point you win. Or you could win by just deploying the troops and standing around, for some reason. Or you could deploy the troops, none spawn on the map, and then you randomly lose some time later. :|

The American mission involves the inverse - kicking the Russians out as they're invading. This is actually a mission with gameplay - Russia will capture bases from right to left and push on you, while you need to cap your own bases, make a home base, and roll out units. By capping more bases you get more funds with which to build more units, and with more bases you increase your population and increase how many units you can have at one time. Play smart, gather up an offensive, and crush the Russian forces until they have 0 bases left, at which point you win.

So this latter mission sounds a bit generic but fine, right? Well...that's where the units failing to follow orders comes in and screws all this up. I understand that in most RTSes, when you tell a unit to 'move to this point', they will do so to the best of their ability. Not so in this game.

If units run into enemy units along their path, they will stop and attack those enemy units. Possibly obnoxious if you just want them to hurry to a point, but not the end of the world, right? But if they kill all the enemies...they don't resume their route, they just stop there and idle, without orders. Cue furious clicking to get them moving again.

And how about base capture? You need troops to do that, so you tell them to capture the base flag and that's it, right? No...not always. Units won't always move exactly to the point you tell them to. I can understand this for a bunch of units that need some space from each other, but even for one individual infantry unit, they may not move directly to the point... So many times, I thought I was capturing only to notice, oh, no, my men are just standing AROUND the capture point, not IN it. Cue furious clicking to get them to stand right.

I tried to play this game like an intelligent RTS player, creating multiple groups of units and pincer-attacking at numerous places around the map simultaneously...but I just couldn't do it. My groups of units would fail to cap without micromanagement, random bits and pieces of my groups would attack enemies and then become separated from the rest of the group as they idled upon defeating their foes. I was dancing all around the map to manage even just two groups of units, to make sure they WEREN'T JUST STANDING THERE HOLY CRUD.

Yeah. Unless you love frustration, and watching how a developer can somehow break the basic concept of RTS path-finding in 2018 of all times, give this one a pass. This issue utterly destroys what little gameplay there is to be had here.

#raid_on_coasts -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/charemplaysgames