- Year: 1999
- Platform: Windows
- Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.
- Developer: Charybdis Limited
- Theme: RTS
It was inevitable that someone would bring the kind of graphics usually reserved for flight sims and first person shooters to the strategy table. The real time strategy genre where the player harvests minerals, creates bases, pumps out military units and sends them to their deaths is one full of quality games but most have yet to harness the new 3D technology (Myth, as a purely tactical game doesn’t count). While Battlezone , Urban Assault and Uprising have used 3D, these games are fundamentally different from your standard RTS because they are built around the first person view. Machines (along with the likes of Warzone 2100 – Ed.) is attempting to bring us a new generation of RTS games. It has a first person view, a floating camera view, and a standard top-down view, but more on that later. While the graphics in Machines certainly aren’t comparable to those found in other genres, it’s still a step up from some of the rather bland sprites and terrain found in other RTS’s. The question is, does*** Machines*** do anything with these graphics to enhance the gameplay that has already been taken to new heights by Starcraft and Total Annihilation, among others? Unfortunetly the answer is no, but Machines does manage to be an enjoyable game in its own right.