Having crushed the mighty Saurian armies once more and saved the galaxy by destroying their nefarious Megastar, I decided it was time to put Generic RTS Game #432 aside for a bit to try out something really… well, really weird. See, this little game by Codemasters called “Perimeter” had caught my eye recently, so I finally decided to pick up a copy and give it a spin. Perimeter sets out to take the generic FPS formula and basically crap all over it whilst madly proclaiming “hah hah, you suck!” with a totally new and wacky approach to gaming. But is the end result worth the heavy learning curve incurred from this unquestionably different gaming experience? When it’s all said and done, will the average gamer pause and go “whoa, that was cool”, or just bluster around with “what the HELL did I just play?” Determined to answer that question, I installed the game and set out on my quest through the Psychosphere.

The first thing I picked up about Perimeter is that it doesn’t really clearly document what the hell it’s all about. The intro movie shows what I can only define as “some stuff happening”, but there’s no narrative, or even any real dialogue, so I never understood what was going on while I was watching some guy stand around outside his ship (which was being loaded up with cargo), then eventually take off. Only digging around online finally educated me on what the game was really about, something which only became slightly clearer as I progressed through the campaign. Apparently, humanity has decided to abandon Earth to go on a mighty journey called the “Exodus”. I’ve never been able to find out why Earth was abandoned, nor did I really ever understand what the eventual objective was (I think it’s the “find a new home” kind of gig), but transportation through the universe is being done via inter-dimensional gates that take the giant cities carrying the last pockets of humanity (called “Frames”) to locations in a vast networked chain of worlds called the “Psychosphere”. There’s some vague talk on how the worlds and entities encountered in the Psychosphere are created from the thoughts and fears of those traveling within it, but this is never explained any further. The journey takes over the course of many years (according to the information presented, several years actually pass between each mission), and the chief guiding force for humanity is an evolved faction called the “Spirit Council”. Unfortunately, not everyone is decent enough to blindly follow these “Spirits” on their united quest to explore the alternate dimension, and so political rivalries begin spreading throughout the different Frames – some go crazy and try to start their own mini-empire by absorbing other Frames into their cause, while others think the Spirits have been lying to them all this time and want to find their way back to Earth. Adding to everyone’s headaches are a race of what I can only classify as “space bugs” (well, technically they’re called the “Scourge”), whom are attracted by the presence of the Frames and tend to go a little crazy, trying to destroy anyone and anything.

With the kind of unique universe the game has and all the different factions at play, there’s plenty of room for a great storyline to come into effect, but as I’ve already stated, the presentation is very sub-par. The first three missions mostly consisted of me blinking repeatedly and trying to blindly follow mission objectives without the slightest clue on what the hell I was doing or why, simply because the game never stopped to try and explain some critical storyline aspects to me. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by superior titles in the past, but I found the pacing of Perimeter’s storyline to be all wrong and it took me far longer than it should have to clearly grasp what was going on. Then, just when I thought I had everything figured out, the story tossed some new elements my way. At one point, the game will begin randomly jumping your perspective from Frame to Frame seemingly without cause or reason, until you learn that the game is trying to present the story from all angles. The constant barrage of cutscenes that failed to explain anything didn’t help either – it’s almost as if the game would try to start on a brief explanation of what the hell was going on, then suddenly pop up a cutscene with “ooooh, look! Action!” and whisk me off to the next mission. There are some intermission fragments that indicate when the player’s perspective has been changed to another Frame, but those ended up being the only cutscenes where I actually understood what was happening. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a bad thing when I’m struggling to comprehend a game’s storyline and keep getting struck with the nagging feeling that I missed a memo somewhere, over and over again. Cutscenes with zero context do not advance the storyline, guys, nor does an incredibly vague manner of narration and mission briefings that do nothing to introduce who I’m working for or why I should care.

Of course, the storyline isn’t the only thing that could be considered unusual about Perimeter, as the gameplay is definitely something else entirely. Uniqueness is never something I would consider “bad” in this day of rehashed Command & Conquer/Age of Empires clones, but the implementation has to be good, or the experience suffers. Perimeter’s gameplay revolves around three things: terraforming, building units, and a massive shield called the “Total Defense Field”, which can be raised at any time to surround all of the player’s buildings to protect them from harm. Sounds like something everyone would abuse the hell out of, but the shield takes massive amounts of energy (an essential resource) to power, and there are several ways to get around it. More on that in a bit, but first, let me delve into the terraforming aspect. Perimeter boasts an impressive engine capable of handling fully dynamic terrain, and a huge part of strategy and gameplay actually revolves around exploiting this system. By applying a “Zero Layer” tool, players can flesh out a green zone that determines where their active terrain borders lie. Within this zone, any imperfections in the terrain will be fixed, and hills, canyons, or other terrain features will all be modified until they are perfectly flat and in alignment at a specific height. The reason for this is that structures can only be built on a perfectly flat and clean “Zero Layer” area, so clearing out terrain is a must for anybody hoping to expand. The process is far from instant of course – “Brigadiers”, small utility vehicles containing a deployable swarm of terraforming bots must be active somewhere in the field in order for the terraforming process to begin, though the bots themselves can sometimes take a significant time to complete their task, as all the dirt and terrain they gobble up and shift around has to come and be deposited from somewhere. Watching the Brigadiers at work is actually a neat process, as seeing a little black swarm of robotic insects fly over the terrain, grabbing dirt and depositing it in a more effective area (and noticing the gradual rise of random holes in the terrain as a result) is a really cool effect.

Brigadiers aren’t unlimited though, so players don’t have the option of just pumping out a few dozen and watching the terrain warp itself under their ungodly rule. Both Brigadiers and Buildmasters are vehicles that fall under the classification of “MMP”, and each Frame is only allotted five MMP-class vehicles. These vehicles can be transformed into Brigadiers or Buildmasters at any time, but since only five MMPs can be active at a time, it makes for a tricky balancing act. Brigadiers are utterly essential for terrain expansion, as well as repairing any damage to a Zero Layer area that unstable terrain or certain enemy weapons might cause, but structures cannot be built or repaired without Buildmasters. It definitely makes for a tricky and interesting tactical dilemma when players are trying to figure out if they want to expand terrain quicker, build/repair structures quicker, or just divvy up their capabilities into both fields, and since it takes some time to morph an MMP (it has to fly back to the Frame to be converted), these decisions usually need to be made well in advance.

Flat terrain is an absolute must for expansion to occur, but power is another necessity. Energy collectors are basic structures that not only expand the player’s energy grid (structures must be within the circular zone of an energy collector in order to function), but gather physical power (which is the game’s essential, singular resource for unit/building construction) from Zero Layer areas. Energy collectors can be dropped just about anywhere considered flat terrain, but the only way to actually make them productive is to ensure that they have a totally clear circular area around them to gather energy – plopping two energy collectors close together just won’t work, since the second collector won’t get any benefit out of the overlapping circular zone. When placing the collector, an overlay indicates the space required to get the best use out of the collector, so having lots of clear space available is usually best. Once the collector is complete, a tower will rise up and some shiny stuff will appear around the structure’s base, indicating where new buildings (such as turrets or factories) can now be safely constructed. It’s all pretty straightforward after that – most other structures can only be built on the “shiny stuff” I mentioned, and if an energy collector is destroyed, all the buildings it was powering will go to an inactive state. This leads to some interesting gameplay, as it is possible to take over enemy buildings by forcing them into your active energy zone.

Unit construction is where things get a little more interesting. Two types of units exist: “basic” units, and “complex” units, the latter of which is only obtainable by merging together multiple basic units. So players can either have a squad of really basic, really crappy infantry that usually get slaughtered incredibly fast, or a smaller array of high-end units that can stomp an inadequately-defended base to pieces incredibly fast. Every squad starts with basic units of three types (Soldiers, Officers, and Techs), and more complex units have prerequisites based on these basic troops – such as three Soldiers per missile tank, for example. Fortunately, the interface makes assembling squads a snap, as any unit you build will be lumped into a single active group (up to five can be used at a time, availability of which is determined by the number of Command Center structures currently owned by the player) that immediately lists all current units in the squad and allows new basic units to be built from nearby factories, which are then sent into the field as reinforcements. Selecting a complex unit to morph into causes a really wacky “floating ball of grey goo” effect that eventually ends in the creation of your new units. Definitely neat, and the system works really well for the most part, but a very aggressive unit limit makes setting up large squads with different focuses a little tough - though I think this makes for good gameplay balancing. Also, units can be morphed as many times as the player wants, but each morphing attempt depletes the squad’s personal level of transformation energy, requiring them to spend a certain amount of time recharging.

One curious note to Perimeter is that units can move just about anywhere. Buildings, steep hills (some of which block even terraforming efforts for some reason) and even enemy units won’t impede your own squads in the slightest, as each vehicle either flies or at least has hover capability and effectively floats over any obstacle. There is a limitation however, the “abyss”, which causes any non-flying unit to be destroyed if it attempts to cross. Since it is possible for players to use their own specific tool to create an abyss in the ground, this adds a new strategic possibility of randomly denying ground to enemies, but a complete and total lack of decent pathfinding AI causes this idea to fall flat on its face. Some missions have a huge abyss layer in certain areas by default (almost like the rivers and lakes you’d see in other RTS games), which forced me to use my terraforming tools to set up large bridges of terrain to send my ground forces across safely (it’s possible to morph units into flying vehicles, then morph them back into whatever they were before once they’ve reached safe land, but sometimes I didn’t find it practical). Things were going well, until I tried to send my gigantic platoon of tanks across the convoluted bridge I had set up. At the first turn, they simply kept going straight on in a beeline for my designated waypoint and were all subsequently annihilated as they plunged to their doom in the abyss. Great, like I have nothing better to do than babysit stupid units that have no idea how to take care of themselves.

Aside from a pathetic display of pathfinding, Perimeter’s AI is at least mostly decent – terraforming bots know automatically where they are needed best, and will prioritize repairing damaged terrain inside your borders over trying to expand outwards when your base is under attack, and enemy units will morph on the fly to try and counter whatever strategy you are using (some vehicles are incapable of attacking others, so the AI tries to take advantage of this by switching to whatever unit type you are weak against). I was satisfied by the AI presentation, but still felt it could have been done a lot better, especially with the boneheaded moves I kept seeing, both in my own units and those against me. I wish I could comment further on how the AI handled in a multiplayer environment with me and a buddy teaming up together, but sadly we were unable to ever connect to one another, a common issue with the game’s matchmaking interface according to a brief glimpse at some message board postings. Since Gamespy hasn’t gotten their act together to add the game to their Gamespy Arcade service at the time of this writing, I don’t think I can really comment on multiplayer at all, in fact.

I’m going to touch briefly on the campaign again before getting on to the final elements of this review. Basically, as the player moves through each mission, he’s granted the opportunity to experience the evolving story from the perspective of each of the different Frames in the universe, and while the story shows them eventually splitting off, each with totally different interests, the actual gameplay still ends up being the same, and quickly lapses into repeat scenarios (thanks to the relatively small maps and a total lack of complex mission scripting, there wasn’t much room for storyline-related intrigue I guess). One mission might start off describing a new faction arising that wants to start taking over Frames and settling in, so the resulting missions generally just involve trying to capture enemy Frames. Another focuses on one faction’s desire to explore deeper into the Psychosphere, so the objectives end up just involve sending your frame to a warp gate in one piece. Still others repeatedly involve “hold off the Scourge until we’re ready to go” or “secure energy collectors in specific areas until we figure out where to build our warp gate”. This honestly isn’t just a one time thing – missions just end up turn into having the player do the same thing he’s already done over and over again, just in different areas with slightly unique challenges. Considering how games as ancient as the original Command & Conquer have offered more interesting and varied mission objectives (with better-defined storylines to boot), I have to question what the hell happened here. To top it all off, the mighty venture through the campaign ended in what was ultimately a disappointing ending. Thanks!