![]() ![]() Instead, I spent my entire time with the Goo clicking keyboard shortcuts and ordering units. Unlike the Beta and the Humans, there is no way to automate their unit production process. But the Goo are also uniquely frustrating. Their art style, too, sits in a creepy uncanny valley between mechanical and biological. They’ve got some of the same swarm-tactics flavor as StarCraft’s Zerg and Warhammer 40k’s Tyranids, but their supply line infrastructure is unique. Petroglyph did a great job making the Goo unlike anything else in RTS. The Mother Goo splits, mitosis-style, to form units or other Mother Goos that will set up on another resource pool and become its own production base. Park a blob of nanobots, the “Mother Goo,” over a resource pool and they will self-replicate. The eponymous Goo are Grey Goo’s most interesting group and, unfortunately, the most tedious to play. Depending on your playstyle, either of these factions will be immediately recognizable and playable-a valuable mental toe hold for players to start trying to understand the third faction. Especially in the early game, Human and Beta units are so similar that I had to consult the in-game encyclopedia to learn that their health, armor, and damage stats are actually different. I don’t mind their strategic footholds being derivative of other games in the genre, but I would have liked to see more differences between these two armies. Though they are visually distinct, these two factions are extremely similar in terms of mechanics and unit trees. One central reactor runs power lines to every building and technology hub, making one central megabase with long supply lines stretching to the front. Humans are much more centralized-in our Company of Heroes comparison, these guys are the Americans. Roughly analogous to the British in Company of Heroes, these bases are both a way to move my production facilities closer to the front lines and another weakness for the enemy to attack and divide my attention. The Beta use mobile base hubs to establish a series of standalone bases that each specialize in a different kind of unit. The Humans and the Beta aren’t anything we haven’t seen in RTS games before, but they’re familiar in a good way: traditional RTS design that we already know is fun, revitalized in a modern game. The humans, on the other hand, never get their boots dirty from behind the controls of their hovering vehicles. Weirdly, the Beta have the most human-looking design: industrial buildings, walking mecha tanks, and dudes with rifles and backpacks slogging through the mud. ![]() The central conflict of Gray Goo is between the Beta, a humanoid race of hardy warriors, and high-tech future humans. If your PC isn’t quite up to spec you can still enjoy it by lowering the settings to the minimum, but be warned: the tiny individual units really lose definition at lower settings. I got a solid 50 fps during heavy battles, even with epic units and the particle effects cranked way up. It ran smoothly on my rig at 1080p on the highest graphics settings. Grey Goo includes basic graphics sliders and toggles (detail level, vsync, bloom, depth of field, etc.) and a maximized borderless window option. Play it on: Core i5, 8GB RAM, GeForce GTX 570/ AMD Radeon HD 7870 Reviewed on: Core i5, 8GB RAM, GeForce GTX 570 ![]()
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