Mayday
Well, well, what do we have here then? Could it be a top-down, 2d RTS by any chance? How unique, you think. Just wait, there's even more innovation just round the corner! Mayday: Conflict Earth takes place in 2051, when the three superpowers, the United American Continents, the Asian Federation and the Southern Block, finally clash into conflict. You choose your side and then take command in 13 missions with varying objectives along the kill-everything-that-moves-line. Rather clever so far, right?
Right, that's enough of acid-dripping irony! True, Mayday is in many ways a run-of-the-mill RTS, I still feel it has its qualities, as well as a few features of its own. For starters, there's the budget. The budget is money you have disposable to invest in research and intelligence. Intelligence is basically tips for the future, it may be informative enough but I haven't felt so far that the information motivates its price. The research is more interesting. The research screens present you with the current research ideas and their development costs. As you plow more money into a project, the number of missions it will take before it is completed decreases. This nice little feature means you have control over what units you get and when, allowing a bit more customisation than other RTS campaigns offer. Once you're done with spreading the budget, you go to the briefing screen. There, you're presented with a nice world map with the current hotspot flashing. Click it, and some basic geographical info is displayed. Then, your commander updates you on the situation and your next mission. When he's done, you get detailed mission information, including a very useful map overview. The information in the breifings is actually helpful and connected to the missions, something I've missed in RTS games for a long time. Then, once you feel sufficiently briefed, the action begins!
I must say I really like the in-game graphics, finally a 2d RTS game has got mountains, and grass colour too, right! There are also a lot more trees around than usual, further improving the feel of the landscapes. Units, buildings and other bits and pieces look just right too, no problems telling which is which or anything. Gameplay-wise Mayday has two nice tweaks of its own. First, there is no resource gathering apart from collecting and recycling battlefield debris. Secondly, there is no base building, you can't create buildings! How about that for a change, eh? Combine that with the fact that any infantry unit can capture any building, and things start to differ from the standard formula. Personally I like those changes, things feel a lot more realistic when you don't slap up a base in five minutes and earn money by collecting ore liberally sprinkled over the landscape.
The missions themselves may not be to everyone's liking. Most of the ones I've played so far have you starting with just a bunch of units, requiring you to capture some enemy position to be able to expand. This may mean both one and twenty reloads as you try to find the right path through the map. Gameplay feels quite unforgiving, do the wrong thing and you'll just have to reload, and this makes you save a lot. However, I still find the gameplay pretty addictive, in an old fashioned kind of way. With the lack of both scripted events and a decent AI, there is a certain old-school feeling to Mayday.
Unit control reminds of games past too. Pathfinding is pretty good, but the friendly unit AI could do with some more work. There are five different behaviour modes you can put your units in, yet none of them feels very useful for more than a few seconds at a time. Aggressive mode, for example, makes units pick and attack targets by themselves, which sounds pretty useful. However, if there is no enemy in range, they will pick a target out of range, or even out of sight, and move to attack it. That means you'll only be able to use this mode efficiently for a few seconds during enemy attacks, unless you want your units to start wandering about and getting killed when you look away. For some reason, it's also difficult to hit enemy units when you want to order attacks. The best tactic seems to be to advance slowly and let the enemy come at you. Lack of formations, as well as the mission layouts, further promotes that tactic.
All the people you have contact with between missions are filmed, and acting quality isn't perhaps the best ... Mayday has a touch of its own here too however, as all the actors are Greman, or perhaps Austrian, and you hear that when they speak (it feels a bit wrong for the American commander to have that German accent) ...
To try and wrap things up, Mayday is an interesting buy at budget price, but I wouldn't pay full price for it. It has a few nice ideas of its own, like the refreshing lack of base building, gameplay with a C&C feel to it and is very playable once you get into it. A clone with a bit of mind of its own ...
