And although the game's presentation seems to be a homage to
StarCraft, the gameplay never manages to stray far from the standard RTS formula, not coming close to the 'separate but equal' sides of the Protoss, Zerg, and Terrans.
The plot is actually rather interesting: in a race to go somewhere else in the solar system to exploit minerals, two factions come up with the best way to do it. One wants to use genetically altered beings, and the other wants to use robots. Of course, there's no such things as a pleasant disagreeing, so combat inevitably ensues. The story definitely develops as the game goes on, which is nice for a game that in almost every other respect plays too formulaic.
The few tweaks to the standard real-time strategy fare are noticeable, but in the end only change a few details about how the game works. For one, there's no 'hard limit' on the number of troops you can have at once. Instead, every troop costs some amount of upkeep, and when you too many, your cash flow takes a nosedive. There are two resources, but only one that's meant for 'collection' -- metal. All of the supplies of it are inexhaustible, although they slow down production as a battle goes on. The other is energy, and while your buildings will always work to a low efficiency without energy, supplying them with full power keeps them at maximum speed. Energy is distributed by a network, reminding me of the electric fences in Dark Reign 2. You can use the energy equivalent of a repeater station to reach far-flung locations, but the destruction of one of the stations will disrupt your supply.
There's also a surprisingly large tech tree, which helps to make up for the somewhat limited number of vehicles. Even the wimpy starting units have purposes near the end of a long battle, after all the upgrades -- they're just more specialized, being used for sneak attacks and kamikaze missions rather than straight-out combat units. With the lack of formation commands, battles often degenerate into a bum rush, hoping that your good units can survive as they are mobbed by the baddies. It's not particularly strategic, unfortunately.
It's not that Outlive is necessarily a bad game. Yes, the sides feel a touch unbalanced, but there's always patches for that. It's just that it feels like almost every other RTS released in the past few years.
The game has built-in multiplayer support, over null modem, phone modem, a LAN, or the Internet. The Internet servers are run by Continuum, and they seem to be in fine working order. However, I didn't run across much of anyone to play the game against.
