14 DAY TRIAL // I've always liked real-time strategy games, but I find myself increasingly reluctant to play Starcraft 2 because it's just so competitive and demanding that it's not relaxing anymore.
It's fun, but not relaxing. So I'm always on the lookout for alternatives. Starcraft 2 is highly polished and very well designed, which makes it very hard to compete with if you're a smaller studio.
Paradox Interactive carved its own niche with its grand strategy games, but they are also a handful, not the kind of games you get into for some quick fun.
This is where Boid comes in, a small-scope game that uses simplified mechanics and dilutes the real-time strategy genre to its bare essentials.
The action takes place underwater, and you assume control of a legion of minimalist minions and try to conquer some key objectives on tiny maps and then exterminate the opposition.
It's a very streamlined and easy-to-learn strategy game, that feels a lot more casual than the serious alternatives, due to the lack of a steep learning curve when it comes to units, upgrades, economy and build orders.
However, it's also deceivingly complex and requires you to pay attention to what's going on and get a feel for the overall dynamic in order to succeed.
You can zoom out to get a better view of the map
Things start out slow, on every map you begin controlling a creature spawner that automatically creates units at set intervals. The base units are highly mutable life forms that aren't particularly good or bad at any given task.
You quickly examine the layout of the maps (which are usually symmetrical in order to keep things balanced) and decide on your next move.
There are other neutral spawners to capture, as well as hotspots that can transform your basic units into specialized creatures that offer various trade-offs, such as increased speed at the cost of health, or the ability to heal your units, at the cost of their offensive capacity.
The main challenge in the game is to time your attacks just right, and to discover the best way to use the mutators to increase your chances to achieve victory. The type of troops you should focus on depends on various factors such as the distance you have to travel, the number and type of enemy units, how good your defenses are, and so on.
The design is overall very good and everything is clear at a glance and easy to use. The visuals are minimalist but they look really good overall, and the pacing is also a strong point, as the action is not fast enough to become confusing, and not as slow as to become tedious and boring.
It's intuitive and easy to pick up, and it offers a more relaxed experience than conventional strategy games do. Aside from sending troops and casting some special spells you find on the maps, everything is pretty basic.
The downside is that, being so streamlined and simplified, it also lacks the depth that strategy gamers are usually looking for in their games. There is no resource management, no base or army building, just tactical choices to make.
Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to get the right dynamic
The matches are fast and pretty decisive, there's not much time wasted when you lose, there aren't any drawn-out games or wars of attrition, usually when one side is on the winning side the advantage starts piling up pretty fast.
There's an obvious tipping point, beyond which you are hard-pressed to recoup from. Advantages tend to snowball, and the lack of complex game-turning units or stratagems means that you can't compensate for poor early choices, but also that you won't generally find yourself losing a game where you got a stellar start.
For the time being, it has some balance issues, but there is a lot of potential there for a niche that services those looking for a different type of experience, easier to pick up, without the high skill ceiling of other strategy games, and with less of a time investment requirement.
