Earth 2160 (PC)

Earth 2160 or bust!

Not quite hot on the heels of our recent Earth 2160 preview I’ve been hammering away at a follow up to it, in the form of this review. I’ll say right from the start that I am a big fan of the Earth series of games and thoroughly enjoyed Earth 2150 and the Moon Project.

I wanted to try and get into the nitty-gritty of the game and hit on all my loves and hates in the review, without giving the game’s plot away too much or spoiling anything for anyone.

The Story

Earth 2160 is set after the events in Earth 2150 and is the proper sequel to the game, unlike the tie-ins like the Moon Project that took the story into a slightly different tangent. Humans escaped the collapse of the Earth in 2150AD and fled to Mars, to terraform it. The Eurasian Dynasty, the Lunar Corporation and the United Civilised States all worked to slice up the planet for their own ends.

Until 2160, when something happens to change all that, strange planets are sighted with oddly liquid surfaces – what’s going on, and will the 3 factions join together or wage climatic wars?

It’s a typical kind of sci-fi story you’d expect with the Earth series, and that’s fine because this is a core RTS and doesn’t really require a massively deep story to promote the action.

Gameplay

The game is a single player or multiplayer experience and the single player portion is split over 4 factions – each has 7 single player missions. At any time over the course of these you’ll be doing a variety of things, recovering important tech-tree items and waging war against hostile factions, enemies, NPCs and other things. It plays like pretty much any other RTS and does what it does, very well.

The GUI has been streamlined, it’s not too confusing and the pop-up screens can be altered to your preferences, there’s a great deal of customising you can do with the GUI in the game while you’re playing, closing windows with a click of the mouse and keeping the most important ones open. This has however become par-for-the-course in most new RTS games.

There are going to be some disappointments for the fans of the classic Earth series though, the developers removed the tunnels feature from the game and have made several adjustments, HQ buildings no longer allow control over various features of the game – like research and so forth automatically.