Petroglyph , responsible for this bet, is the company formed by those workers of Westwood Studios who resisted being absorbed by Electronic Arts in 2003. Although since then they have released notable titles such as the Panzer General saga or the RTS Universe at War and Empire at
War (Star Wars), its splendor reached him as Westwood in the nineties, initiating the golden age of strategy in real time and dominating it incontestably first with his Dune and then with Command & Conquer . Maybe we can not say that these people are the parents of the strategy in real time, but they were at least very present in the delivery.
GAME OF THRONES – EPISODE 2: THE LOST LORDS
This circumstance is more than enough for his latest work, the Gray Goo that we analyze today, deserves all our interest, but we were still more
attracted to appreciate the flats that these people have had to get into a development of this depth in a genre absolutely Covered by pieces like Company of Heroes and, above all, a reference to which our heads will go at all times; the masterpiece of Blizzard,
Starcraft . In addition, reading the script of the game does not help to turn our minds to the Terran, Zerg and Protos of Blizzard, when in Gray Goo we will face some
humans with a military race very advanced and another as exotic as it can be an immense mass of nanorobots that phagocytes everything in its path.
Those will be the last associations that we make between the game of Petroglyph and Blizzard, but not with those titles directly related to these creators, mainly
Command & Conquer. We will be very surprised by the quality of the introductions , the menus and the ” breafings ” pre-mission. We can not avoid reminding the real actors who played them in the aforementioned saga C & C, a budgetary and technical waste that perhaps only that boom in PC strategy has been able to allow.
Nowadays they would be too expensive precisely because of what Gray Goo uses; artificial characters, yes, but with the most exquisite use of motion capture, facial animation and organic textures detailed to the extreme. With all this they can show on the screen
very credible aliens , who are also so well animated and interpreted that they are capable of generating the same empathy and familiarity in the player as if those human actors of the 90s had been used.
They serve these characters to start us in the plot, very open at the beginning, where we are a human race whose evolutionary leap has come thanks to master the technology of teleportation and now is dedicated to explore and exploit other worlds.
With them cross the Beta , humanoids of reptilian aspect with whose adventure and characters we empathize even more than with humans, who flee from an authentic cosmic threat as is the third species in dispute, the Goos .
It is not a race in itself, nor even a being or beings. Goo is a mass of nanorobots capable of cloning themselves and evolving with the extracted from those beings that phagocyte. In this way they have become a true planetary threat , as well as humans and beta perceive it, also sharing the objective of ending this gray threat before it ends with its own species.
This argument, not too far-fetched if we situate ourselves in a space scenario with several competing races, leads us to a classic RTS where we will have to extract resources, build with them infrastructures that in turn create weapons and defenses capable of eliminating an opponent that is doing precisely the same.
When using the term ” classic ” we do it with the maximum emphasis that can be given to this word. Gray Goo is in its conception, development and results a game aimed at seeking that appetite that in recent years players have for the most classic cut of gaming, by the games of the old school .
The most obvious characteristic that this is so is the simplification of the action. Gray Goo is undoubtedly the RTS with the lowest learning curve in a long time. Any player who has even tried an RTS will be able to control the game as if it had been months in front of him. Another very different thing will be to win in it, but we’ll talk about that later.
