Darwinianevolution

User Score
4.0

Presentation - 3.0
Gameplay - 6.0
Value - 3.0

The gaming space can be a daunting and harsh place for many developers, especially for those who decide to go independent. Without any previous notable work, gaining traction and making a name for yourself is extremely difficult, even if the gaming media has allowed for many underdog stories, either through viral popularity or through the increasing value of indie games for big publishers. For every Cuphead, FNAF or Shovel Knight, there are tens of thousands of games that are left stranded, fighting to make their investment successful in a more and more saturated market. However, the independent market does have one big advantage, and is its ability to continue working with certain genres that fell out of popularity years ago. I’ve mentioned before in some of my other reviews that the RTS genre had its zenith during the 2000s, and after that, their popularity steadily waned in favour of other genres. Games belonging to the MOBAs or the Turn Based 4X only focus on one singular aspect of the RTS gameplay, either micromanaging units without the hustle of base-building, or base-building without the need to bother with real time or constant unit management. Sadly, while this approach was successful, it left the RTS genre as a “Jack of all trades, master of none”, and it went out of style. Fortunately, that left the independent market with enough room to create their own works, free of competition from big publishers. One of the many small RTSs that populate Steam nowadays is Nightside.

Now, the only reason why this game picked my interest, outside of it being an RTS, is its similarity at first glance with a game called Submarine Titans. Now, most of you know that I’m a huge fan of that obscure title (and by the way, don’t worry about it, I’ll make a review of it soon, probably around November-December). The screenshots of Nightside promised RTS action set on an alien landscape, and it reminded me of the setting of Sumbarine Titans, with submarine fights at the bottom of the ocean. The real results of my game time with it was quite different, however. While the settings, mechanics and overall gameplay are very different from the start, I feel like Nightside could learn quite a lot from Submarine Titans. It also needs to be addressed some of the important flaws and poor choices the developers took while making Nightside, as well as how to improve the series in the already announced sequel. The game has potential, but that potential is just that, potential, and a lot of work will have to be put into the title if they want the series to survive in the future.

Nightside is an RTS developed by Omnidream Creations, set in a planet where four factions are fighting for dominance: the Nova, the YX, the Humans and the Noxx. All of them are fighting to gain control of the planet, and more importantly, the valuable resource known as “green ice”. It is the only resource of the game, and it’s only found at certain specific points in each map. The game then consists of all of the players fighting to gain control of the most amount of green ice spawn points (the game cleverly makes sure this points never get exhausted, avoiding problems with resource scarcity) to then overwhelm their opponents. There is a single game mode, which is your typical skirmish. No “King of the Hill”, no “Regicide”, no “Deathmatch”, no “Sudden Death”… As such, all matches end up following the same pattern: The way of defeating your enemies is by destroying their main building. At the beginning of a match, you will have a single central structure, irreplaceable and essential for the creation of your base. While it’s not the only structure capable of creating economic units (the Nova and the Noxx can do it through other means), if that building is destroyed, that player is defeated immediately. As such, the game falls quite frequently victim to zerg rushing, even more so than other games. Even with 4 players, the maximum amount available in a match, it’s very rare for a single game to last more than 20-25 min. And this is further exposed with the design of the factions.

Each faction has a very different playstyle from the rest, so different in fact that it will take most players a try or two to get used to some of the weirdest factions of the setting. In particular, the YX and the Noxx are quite complicated, and not recommended for beginners. The Humans and the Nova are the ones easier to pick up, and even then you might be confused sometimes, but after a while you’ll get used to them. The level of depth of each one of them is found at their particular abilities, due to most of them sharing technology, although this limits to investigation, not units. They all share things like upgrades for attack and defense for units, most of them have some form of shield, they all upgrade their scout (though the aspect in which they do that differs from each faction)… and the skill and tech tree is mostly done. Outside of upgrading one ability or two for the special units, all of the factions have shockingly small room for growth, and it is quite easy for all players will have maxed out in a short amount of time. Now, this is not a bad thing at all, on the contrary. The matches are fast and they rarely go over 30min, which is the time required for fast matches for other RTSs. The fact the tech trees are so short complements the fast pace of the game quite nicely. What does not complement it is unit movement itself. When I first played the game, I thought all units moved unbearably slow. The gatherers moved slowly, the land units moved slowly and clunky, the only ones that avoided this were the air units, and that’s kind of their point. However, after playing multiple rounds of the game, I realized this is necessary. The game is designed for short rounds as it is, if you increased the movement speed of the units, zerg rushing would be so predominant that most matches would end in less than 10min. The movement speed is not the problem here. What it is a problem here is the graphic and art design of the game.

The art design of the game has two inherent flaws. While the simulation of an environment alien and seemingly lifeless is captured quite nicely, all maps end up looking the same. For once, all maps consist of lifeless plains of desolate mineral wastes, with your occasional green ice spawn point and some natural barriers like elevations. This is a problem for two reasons: every map looks similar, and thus, it gets boring to look at. Fast. The second problem is related to the story, but I’ll mention it later. Submarine Titans has a similar problem, but they also have a massive attention to detail in this regard: the ocean floor is filled with colours and interesting things to see: aquatic life, reefs, algae, small volcanoes that explode from time to time, rock formations, gas fountains, ancient and modern human ruins and debris, it has four different styles of lighting, natural barriers that makes you choose the elevation of your units to go over or under them… The maps in Nightside look utterly dead in comparison. The occasional geometrical mineral elevation with a slightly darker shade of purple can’t really improve the visual monotony one can feel after multiple matches. The other problem of the game is its lighting. It is too dark too frequently, and the neon lighting coming from units and buildings, while giving the game an unique aesthetic, is too tiring for the eye, not just in a repetitive way, but in an actual physical way. People with eye problems might not be able to fully enjoy this game, and this problem could be easily solved with different modes and lighting options. There’s also the units’ design to discuss. While not awful, and not as serious of a problem as the two previously mentioned, the factions would benefit a lot from a redesign. In particular, the Nova and the Human factions should really be much more distinctive than what they are now. The YX and the Noxx are fine. The YX are a hive mind species, and as such their angular, almost Lego-like aesthetics work well, and the design of the Noxx is really good, the only one in the game that truly feels alien. But the Nova and especially the humans are somewhat off. The problem with the Nova is that they don’t really have eye catching elements to their design, and benefit from adding more alien-like elements. Maybe designs based of insects, microorganisms or ocean fauna? Maybe more resembling to vintage alien designs? (Also, is it just me or the Nova’s heavy flyer looks like a Warhammer 40k’s Voidraven Bomber?). The problem with the human faction is the fact that they don’t resemble anything remotely close to human designs and aesthetics. This could’ve been explained in the campaign, with the humans being so advanced their designs look unidentifiable and unrecognizable for people of today. However, the game never leaves it clear, and as such, they have an alien-like design for no apparent reason. A more industrial design, or even a zeerust one would have differentiated them from the other factions. Again, this is not a major problem, but it’s something that could be improved.

The game also has a campaign mode, which I’m going to spoil a bit, so be warned. It centres on Adam, a human explorer that gets stranded into an alien planet where a war between the two major factions is plunging the world into chaos. Throughout 14 missions, we’ll play with the four factions in a series of levels designed to show the player how to use each faction, how to counter them, and how to use certain mechanics. The storyline is all right, although it leaves a lot to the imagination, quite more that I would have liked. Why are the YX and the Nova fighting? Why does Adam immediately ally with the Nova? What are the inner politics of the Nova faction to backstab you in the middle of the campaign? And other than the green ice, what are they fighting for? The maps are desolated and they never show either side’s cities or civilian structures worth defending, or important economical centres other than green ice. This doesn’t look like a world worth protecting, or even fighting for. It makes sense for the humans, who just want to get the hell out of there, and for the Noxx, who are so alien anyway that living in that desolate place makes sense, but the other two? I could understand it if it was just a lifeless rock, and the four factions fought for the resources in a no holds barred war, but we never see the stakes at risk, and this is both a problem for the story and the art design. Again, in Submarine Titans, there was the potential of falling into this trap, but it had two things in its favour: the intros for each mission were way more elaborate and with more info, both explained and hinted at, and done with much more personality. Submarine Titans is also an old enough game to come with a manual that explains things a bit further. Nightside’s story has a lot of questions that are never answered. Whether this is a deal breaker, it’s up to each player. There’s also the feeling that the Human faction is overpowered story-wise. You see, there is only a handful of humans on the planet at once, their tech is all based in robots and droids. And these few humans are able to create a massive infrastructure out of nowhere, enough to change the tides of the war until they get fed up with the conflict and decide to leave. Finally, the addition of the Noxx to the story probably meant the extinction of both the Nova and the YX, so the next game may revolve around the fight between humanity and the Noxx? The Noxx are my favourite faction in this game, even though mechanic-wise are somewhat unintuitive. I just hope they stick around for the next game.

Now, the gameplay in the campaign and in the basic skirmish mode is notorious for the lack of a very basic feature, and it is so basic that I’m just wondering why they left that out. The game can’t save. At all. You cannot save your game in the middle of a match, meaning that, if you have to stop playing, or you want to save scum when playing on hard mode, you can’t. This is a baffling omission, and it is almost a deal breaker. I can understand that the game is designed for quick matches, but leaving such an important feature out, not just for RTSs, but for games in general, is unacceptable. Other than that, there are two important points to talk about. First, there is a severe lack of response of the game when you or your base are being attacked. In a game as fast-paced as this, it’s a problem, especially when you are attacking, and the opponents are attacking your base. Having to keep an eye out constantly is not fun, and this could’ve been solved by making the alarm messages more poignant and more precise. Maybe when a building is getting attacked, the message that pops up is bigger and the marks on the minimap are more specific, and when it’s your main building what’s being attacked, the message that pops up is even bigger, even accompanied by a change of score, with some theme of danger indicating the threat in your base. That would give the player more useful information, and as such, help him react appropriately. The second problem is the selection of the hero units during the campaign. For some reason, when you click on the tabs linked to those units, instead of selecting that unit and moving the camera towards it, it just moves the camera. You have to then find your unit and select it manually. While this seems a nit-pick, this can be a problem when your unit is being attack and it’s in the middle of your army. You could lose precious seconds that could cost you the unit, and thus the game. And remember, you can’t save game, so every time you lose, you start the level from the beginning.

Online multiplayer is no more. Despite launching with that feature, and having plenty of Steam achievements related to multiplayer functionality, the games’ servers closed down in 2017. This was accompanied by a price drop to compensate, sure, but they do still include online multiplayer as a selling point on their Steam page, which is a dickish move. At least add LAN functionality to keep the multiplayer selling point going.

Despite my many criticism of the game, I don’t think Nightside is a bad game. It is commendable for a team of just three people to try to make a game as complex as an RTS, but the game has both glaring omissions and many missed opportunities to not pointing them out. Considering its current low price, especially during sales, I wouldn’t mind recommending it, but I would rather just wait for the sequel. Nightside 2 was announced this year, and I wish the best to the team. They have a lot of room for improvement, so I’m hoping to see it come to fruition.