Perimeter definitely boasts a kick-ass engine capable of rendering a lot of detail in the environments and bases, but it has many shortcomings. Later on in the main singleplayer campaign, when bases and strategies became larger and more complicated, my framerates tended to bog down to a huge degree. Nothing so severe that the game was unplayable, but it was very noticeable, especially on an XP2500 Athlon supplemented by a Radeon 9600 Pro. Curiously enough, pausing the game caused my framerate to suddenly snap back to perfection, as if the sheer weight of the game’s animations and active processing were slowing it down. This is definitely a common problem from what I can tell, though players armed with incredibly beefy systems obviously have nothing to worry about. Making me happy are the facts that the game has a decent interface for tweaking the hell out of all the game’s different graphical settings, as well as the graceful way in which is handles alt-tabbing (always a plus). Aside from immense slowdown and the fact that the specific combat units feel a little under-detailed and poorly animated (the game didn’t really let me zoom in enough to see any significant detail), I don’t have anything to complain about in the graphics department.

Assisting Perimeter’s gameplay experience is a great music track that really fits the experience, be it during a mission briefing or an actual mission. There’s some dynamic music in there to keep things interesting once the combat heats up, and things cool back down during the base-building phases. Voice acting is overall very decent as well, though there isn’t much to go on beyond some basic UI responses dictating base status, and of course the verbal briefings post-mission. Some actual unit feedback might have been nice, although since the armies controlled by the player are supposedly remote-controlled cyborgs, perhaps this wouldn’t have been entirely appropriate. In any case, “decent” is how I can sum up the entire music/voice acting/sound effects portion of the game, but some extra meat put into the sound effects would have at least helped a little. One complaint – the sound of a dozen assault aircraft all firing their missiles at once is VERY painful to listen to thanks to all the high-pitched launch noises that keep playing, and some of the laser effects (and even basic machinegun fire) can be a little hard to stomach in vast quantities. Tone it down a bit, guys!

Perimeter is definitely one of the most unique titles I’ve played to date this year, and I’d love to slap a “oh god this is cool you’ve gotta play it” remark on in closure, but thanks to some degrading elements, I just can’t recommend it to anything but hardcore RTS enthusiasts who want to try something new. The storyline is very difficult to understand and just won’t make sense to newcomers at first, the gameplay is hard to stomach until players start to comprehend all the little “undocumented features” that the game’s brief tutorial utterly and completely fails to explain, the mission objectives get repetitive, frustrating, and even boring as the campaign moves on, and the game engine definitely demands a kick-ass system to ensure an experience that is at least somewhat smooth. Definitely a good attempt by the developers to create something new and interesting – just try to ensure it makes sense next time, eh?