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Bohemia’s new RTS FPS hybrid struggles to marry its two genres, but you do get to be a rad crabI’m not sure whether Silica gels
I’m not sure whether Silica gels
RTS-FPS hybrids aren’t a new thing, but they also haven’t been the most historically successful ventures. Well,Arma 3developers Bohemia Interactive are taking a punt at blending the two genres withSilica, in the hopes that you can both shoot and command things with equal levels of good. It’s the first project to hatch from Bohemia’s incubator program, which helps indie devs make cool games.
Silica is largely the work of one developer, Martin “Dram” Malicharek, who was previously the lead on Bohemia’s Take On Mars. Having given Silica a whirl for over an hour, I struggle to see whether the RTS, FPS hybrid can truly offer the best of both worlds. It does, however, make being a crab extremely good.
Silica - Official Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Silica - Official Announcement Trailer
It’s hard to formulate thoughts on Silica, because the build I played seemed like an extremely early one, and alotof things weren’t fully formed, or formed at all. That’s not a criticism per se, it’s just a forewarning for a series of thoughts which may or may not have much bearing on the final product. My thoughts at this time are mainly crab-related ones.
Silica’s model as an RTS-FPS hybrid allows players to either hop into the cockpit as a commander who gives direction from an aerial perspective, or spawn on the ground as a soldier/gangly alien to join the fight on the ground. Having taken part in an hour-long online session with a bunch of other journos, I’m unsure if it lives up to its lofty ambitions.
Still, being a crab offered a great many benefits. One of the best assets of the crab is the ability to hop into first-person mode and, while it’s a bit disorienting, pretend you’re a rally car with a taste for jabbing human flesh. You’re also able to cling to and scuttle around surfaces like a spider, which genuinely gives you a sense of being a deadly critter as opposed to a slightly dull dude with a gun. The moment you switch over to a non-crab entity, you realise that humans are a bit naff, honestly. You just control a generic sci-fi guy who shot hollow sci-fi weaponry.
It seemed like most fights were decided over wars of attrition, where one team would overwhelm the other with more manpower. In the end, the battles felt more like rams butting horns, as opposed to rams who, as they butted horns, had given their ram mates the signal to pincer maneuver their ram enemies' barns and burn down their hay deposits. Silica in its current state didn’t make me feel like I was part of a full blown conflict between two, or three, enormous factions. It felt more like a few scattered skirmishes in the middle of a barren land. I suppose I’ll keep saying it: with enough time, perhaps this will change.
After crabbing about, I set up my own offline game with bots and hopped into the commander role, just to give it some sort of whirl. It was, unfortunately, mightily confusing. There are zero tooltips or tutorials to help you out, so I clicked everywhere and pressed lots of buttons on my keyboard to see if they did anything. From what I could gather, you’re able to select AI units and send them places. You can harvest crystals scattered across the map which act as your resource, then use them to build barracks and other things. I’m sure it will all see a huge number of improvements and tweaks, but it was pretty confusing and pretty barebones.
If you’re the commander of the alien team, the setup is fairly similar, except that you’re able to place nodes. Now, in the online preview I remember Dram mentioning something about these being a unique way for the aliens to infest the map. Again, I couldn’t figure out how they worked, no matter how hard I tried. What was neat was being able to hop into the body of a soldier or an alien if you swapped out of the commander role.
If Silica wants to marry FPS with RTS, to put it bluntly, it needs a lot more time. And, to be fair, Dram didn’t shy away from that fact. The game’s set to arrive on Steam early access for around one year, with no further plans just yet. While it’s a bit worrisome the version of the game I played seemed quite barebones, at least he’s constructed the skeleton, which is a feat in itself. The ability to swap between ground units and the commander is relatively smooth, and there’s something pretty special about the two working together in some - any - capacity.
My biggest worry is whether the hybrid istooambitious. The commander role doesn’t feel all that significant, and playing as a ground troop doesn’t feel all that impactful. The RTS and FPS halves might be harmonious in that they slot together nicely, but each half lacks depth, so the strategy side is a bit shallow, and the shooting side rings a bit hollow. Given time, I hope Dram can prove me wrong when it launches into early access.
