If only
Submarine Titans played a little more uniquely, we would have a major hit on our hands. As it is, we have a merely solid real-time strategy game with a cool new feature or two, but not enough to really set it apart from the pack.
There’s a storyline, at least a smidgen of an attempt to make the world make sense. A meteor came down, destroying above-ground civilization, and all that survived were two groups of humans who had the pre-cognizance to build on the sea floor -- the White Sharks and the Black Octopi. Hitching a ride on the asteroid were the Silicons, an alien race bent on getting the hell out of this place. The staple resource in this game -- Corium -- came from the asteroid as well. Nothing you haven’t heard before, really.
Yes, there are three playable groups. The White Sharks concentrate on military superiority and are the best when it comes to might in the beginning of the game. But they don’t have the flexibility that the other two groups have and suffer in the end-game from it. The Silicons have a massive tech-tree, but they start out very weak. The Black Octopi lie somewhere in the middle. The problem is this: it’s hard to differentiate between the different groups. The Black Octopi and the White Sharks both use all the same resources and have practically identical structures at first. And although the Silicons look decidedly different and use a few different resources, in the end, they’re a good bit like the other two races as well. It’s not that they don’t each have cool units that no one else does (cyberdolphins! Woot!), it’s just not the same degree of separation as, say, the races in StarCraft. They’re each playable and interesting, but they’re not all that unique.
The game itself brings a few innovations to the field. Since you’re underwater, you have five levels of elevation. Ships can come in on the highest elevation where many ground-based installations can’t reach them and then swoop down on the base. There are all sorts of rock shelves and bridges to go over and under, and building defensive platforms on mid-height shelves is key to base protection. You don’t want people sneaking in under or over your flak, do you?
The coolest part of Submarine Titans, however, is the helper A.I. You can set the game up so that you don’t have to deal with building structures, doing research, or keeping tabs on resources. The A.I. does it all for you -- you just move the submarines around. Or you could set the A.I. to control it all. This getting away from the micromanagement is much appreciated, and the A.I. does a damn fine job of playing the game like it should. It’s not available in the single-player campaign mode (unless I missed it), but it is in multiplayer and skirmish modes. This sort of thing should become standard in RTS games. Sometimes you want to deal with the nitty-gritty, but other times you just want to build fleets of death and send them after your opponents.
