Paraworld is a fantasy-flavored, real-time strategy game with role-playing game elements primarily set in a prehistoric era - a setting that is rarely used for real time strategy games. In the game, your character travels through time and interrupts this parallel world, with the result being several campaigns featuring historical figures who interact with the primitive societies and local hazards you'd expect to find in a prehistoric setting.

Sunflowers Interactive has worked hard on creating a realistic prehistoric feel to the game by having day and night, dry land, sea, lush jungle, ice and lava themed climates and lots of dinosaur and humanoid units of the day.



Like most RTS games, you do need some resource gathering to establish your town - in this case gathering food, wood and stone. There are other elements like civilization building, lots of warfare against fantastically large dinosaurs, hero and special units that play an integral part in the campaigns and three different tribes that you can choose from.

From my brief glimpse inside this game world, i'd have to compare Paraworld's style and presentation to Warcraft III. Not to say that the game doesn't have its own identity, but rather that it uses a lot of the bright and colorful settings, and intricately designed 3D objects and units. Even though Sunflowers is currently working on the real time shadows, the game in its current state beautiful. What stood out the most was the detail on the units like the dino-riders, and how they animate during movement and combat.

Various units have their own style in finishing off a kill as well. For example, during one point in the demonstration I saw, a dinosaur blow an entire area of trees down to make sure there weren't any enemies hiding in them. In yet another play scene a dinosaur ate through a militia barricade. During a typical stroll through the world, there were times where certain dinosaurs fell asleep, giving the player an opportunity to sneak past them. One thing Sunflowers mentioned while showing me these cool gameplay scenes was how scouts in Paraworld will be eaten if you don't keep an eye on them while scouting areas of a map. And as every mother protects her young or unborn, in Paraworld, its a big no-no to touch or even play with T-Rex eggs. Mommy T-Rex is always nearby to eat you alive.

As I mentioned earlier, in Paraworld you can interact with historical figures like Amelia Earhart. If you help Amelia find her way home (we don't want to give you any details that would spoil the storyline) she might reward you or your tribe in some special way. There's a lot of this kind of gameplay happening in Paraworld and adding real world characters is a nice touch. It might also give fans of the missing aviator the "warm and fuzzies" to think about her as somewhat safe instead deep below an ocean on the patch of one of her historic flight..



Another great feature is the ability to upgrade units by killing certain opponents or structures. Some units have a listing of what needs to be destroyed or eaten to upgrade that individual. There are also nine different Heroes, which allow the development of special structures and other unique abilities.



On a side note, I was surprised to find Amazon women as player units for the game. Its rare to find female militia who actually battle in real time strategy games. In most cases you'll find female units gathering resources or something of that nature.

Paraworld was definitely one of my highlights at E3 this year. I can't wait to see this game develop more, and with a release date of Q1 2006, Sunflowers certainly has plenty of time to make this game really shine. We're optimistic that they are going to release a game that is a lot of fun and unique to the genre it's entering.