Taking place in the same standard-issue post apocalyptic future we all seem damned to devolve into over and over again, SunAge is a new strategy title with a bit of a classy, old-school twist to it. Created by overseas developer vertex4, the game forsakes the expected bloom-addled, DX10-enabled rendering engines of today in favor of a 2D graphical design that harkens back to the days of Starcraft.

The game’s environment is a dystopian society where weapons of war have reduced the surface of the Earth to an uninhabitable mess. What’s left of humankind has scrambled for a series of “Domes”, gigantic constructs which shelter them from the wasteland until a chance to rebuild is presented. The problem is that not everyone is able to fit into the Domes and those left behind end up joining the rioting, diseased, mutant hordes. Adding further to the chaos is a robotic alien race from another world called “The Sentinel”, who has taken an unexplained interest in Earth and its inhabitants.

The game has three campaigns (each focused around a major character from all three factions) and uses still-image, voice-acted cutscenes to advance the plot, comic book-style. These do a great job of keeping the story moving and add a certain layer of depth and intrigue to the campaign, but are marred by somewhat stale voice acting (particularly for the human campaign). Still, there’s a kind of mythical quality to the overall plot that makes it desirable to see it all the way through.

Meanwhile, the game has taken an interesting approach to the usual “Rock-paper-scissors” style of play that most real-time strategy titles adhere to. Each unit does have its own specialty in terms of weapons and combat options, but the backbone of your army actually comes from upgrades and special weapons. Each and every unit in the game has an alternate mode it can switch to for a different function; the basic human soldiers for example can deploy a long-range anti-infantry sniper rifle (which makes them very vulnerable to vehicles and close-range attacks), or the fighter aircraft built by the Sentinel race can be ordered to leech from an enemy’s power grid and shut down a given building. On that note, base construction is oriented around laying down special towers to expand your power grid; all buildings must be connected to one of these towers (or your central HQ), or they won’t work. This gives some very specific tactical targets to aim for when an attack is under way, and can also serve as a literal homing beacon to an enemy’s base when followed.

What I like the most about SunAge is the approach to unit combat it uses. I’ve started to hate the trend a lot of RTS titles have of making billion-unit Zerg-rushes the only viable tactical option. While it works well in the right context, I prefer games that are a bit slower paced and more tactical. SunAge addresses this by a squad-based control system. Here’s how it works: You can still crank out infantry and vehicles as usual, but if you drag a box around multiple units, they’ll automatically form together into a single group. Grouped units stay in formation (which can be customized to a limited degree) and will focus fire on any specific target you designate, but have a relatively low maximum cap, depending on the type of units. Because grouping units together and using their abilities is the main way to make them effective, this helps adds an interesting pacing to the game.

This is tempered by a few annoyances though: only units of the same type can be grouped together, so don’t expect to be forming combined squads of infantry and tanks (these need to be grouped, selected, and moved separately). This also means that moving large armies can become cumbersome at times, making it very clear that the game is designed around small, controlled teams. Finally, the formation and movement controls can be really finicky sometimes, and I occasionally had difficulty getting my teams into the right position, or getting them to attack a specific target. The ideas they have on paper are really sound, but the implementation is just a bit rough.

Actually, “just a bit rough” is a phrase I unfortunately need to apply to several elements of this game. The 2D drawn graphics and sprite or particle-based effects look fine, but the units look and feel a little under-detailed. All mobile units in the game are based on sprites, which leads to very choppy-looking walk and turn animations. The limitations with unit rotation I can understand (as a sprite needs to be manually re-drawn multiple times if there’s an expectation to see it from different angles), but the rest of the animation simply looks unfinished.