I could (and should) make a post about all of Arcen's games and point out how they all manage to mesh together different genres into a unique cohesive package, and maybe I will make one for The Last Federation and A Valley Without Wind 2 at some point. But for now, I want to talk about the crown jewel (and first release) from the company, AI War: Fleet Command.
The game is not a looker. It has an aesthetic and it works for the game and is functional. If you're the kind of person (or people, more on that later) who is interested in playing this game, you almost assuredly don't care about the graphics that much.
What the game does is take almost every rule of strategy games and break them. Let's go over the points where AI War breaks free from both the 4x and RTS genre trappings:
1) The AI and the player are playing very different games and different goals. In AI War the player is working to build up enough assets to perform a successful decapitation strike against the AI. The AI starts with more or less the entire galaxy, and the player essentially performs assymetric warfare with the goal of trying to get the AI to pay as little attention to them as possible (until its too late for the AI to stop the plan the player sets in motion). The AI in this game is a programmed intelligence that acts in very specific manner, and is NOT designed to just be another player to compete against.
2) There's a huge amount of randomness that the player must react to, and the way to win is the player to ride the wave of this randomness and not buck against it into a "this is best plan" strategy. This isn't Starcraft or Age of Empires, or even Civ, here you have tech options randomized and the AI behaviors randomizes in addition to the randomness of the galaxy that is generated. The result is that you get all sorts of crazy emergent things going on and that every game is unique and crazy in its own way.
3) It's plays great in single player, and absolutely excels in co-op. The dvision of work in AI War is pretty clean and parallelizes very well. This means that you can more or less play the core game flow in parallel with your other players. Games are long, but if you and a friend set aside a few sessions of a few hours each you can finish one up. Think of them like mini-D&D camapaigns. No other strategy game really has that kind of long,involved co-op play. If you play single player that's fine too. You can scale in and scale out the galaxy size to meet you playlength demands.
4) There's no end to the rabbithole this game can take you. There is a very large amount of added content for the game, but it's not wasteful throwaway campaign garbage (AI War doesn't have a campaign, because RTS campaigns are trash) and instead just more units and more behaviors to add into the ways the game can play out.
5) It's an extreme game. Not in the sense of Mountain Dew, Doritos, and Call of Duty, but in the sense that this game exists and is made for a very specific set of people. If you're still reading this or have been interested in the game in the past, you might be one of those people. Games that cater to an extreme are rare, but if they click with your tastes they are the best things ever.
