It’s no secret that I love strategy games. There is also a special place in my heart for indie games. So when my editor passed me three strategy games worked up by independent developers, I was all over it.

First up is an offering from Inhuman Games that maintains a classic Real Time Strategy feel with a couple of interesting twists; Trash.

Like nearly every title in this genre, Trash is primarily ties the gamer up into the economic system. If you’ve played any strategy game within the last ten years then you’ll understand the deal right away. Most RTS titles really breakdown into a battle for economic supremacy rather than a series of strategically pitched battle. Oh sure, the battles are really the focus of Trash, after all you’re only building up your resources in order to be able to build bigger and badder units with increasing speed, but to win the war you have to win the battle to control resources.

Which is where Trash hopes to make a ripple in the sea of Real Time Strategies that have inundated the market over the years. To be quite honest, ninety percent of Trash is nothing new. Collect metals, energy etc and develop new technologies for making better use of those resources. But Trash introduces one new, and fairly unique, resource; Trash. That’s right, the major resource material for this game is simply recycling the refuse that is strewn throughout the landscape. That includes all the broke down, burned out and disabled vehicles you encounter…or generate.

Nearly everything in the landscape is potentially a resource for your consumption. Your units can break down old buildings, houses, statues, airports, and even your own buildings in an attempt to slake your for raw material.

Unfortunately that is where all of the outstanding features run out. The graphics are clean and bug free but nothing special with the typical isometric viewpoint. Sounds are lackluster and unit types range from the mundane to the bizarre. The downside of the units isn’t the lack of imagination, but the lack of description. It took me several games to figure out which units are actually useful in which circumstances.

Controlling units was also an issue as I had difficulty selecting units and my groupings kept getting dropped. But what was really strange was that they developers seemed to really stress your basic construction unit as the map explorer when clearly the cheap, fast, infantry units were far better suited to the task. Ok, odd, but I’ll buy it. So why was an "explore" command not included on any unit? All the standard unit commands are there and operate pretty much as expected, attack, move, patrol, etc. It works, but it’s difficult to expose the map, move units, queue builds, and all the other myriad and sundry items that it takes to successfully manage an army.

It was nice to play something new and it was good to see that someone is still trying to innovate in this genre and as far as a product from and independent developer, Trash is good work. If you’re a strategy fan looking for something with a little twist, pick up Trash on discount and you should have some fun.

You can try out a demo or purchase the full game by visiting inhumangames.com .