Real-time strategy games like Glest are a great way to spend some of your free time. This type of applications is not only captivating but also very enjoyable, especially when you successfully defeat your opponent.
In Glest there are two factions: one of them is based on magic and the other on technology. Each side has its own spells, buildings, units, researches and unit creation types. While for the mages most of their strong creatures are summoned by other units, for the Techs, the buildings create them.
I didn’t play too much, but from what I’ve gathered, Glest can be pretty linear. It is similar in many ways to Warcraft or Age of Empires so there won’t be too many surprises. The strategy involved is also pretty standard: quickly create many workers to collect resources, and then proceed to amassing your army.
An important advantage is that you can play against three other human players, so you will not have to constantly put up with the symmetrical game-play of the computer opponents. Furthermore, you can create teams, thus balancing the games as much as possible.
Another plus is that you can customize the engine from this application and use it as basis for your own games. This will help developers save a lot of time, as it’s much easier than creating an engine from scratch.
There are several flaws that I discovered while testing Glest. Firstly it doesn’t yet have a campaign mode, so you can only play custom games or scenarios and there aren’t that many maps to choose from either. Moreover, although it’s decent, the graphic design isn’t that impressive.
In conclusion, Glest isn’t a game that I would actually recommend, but with a little bit more work it could actually compete with some of its more popular peers. Furthermore, I’m sure that it took a great effort from the developers to make the application free to play, so they deserve a lot of credit.
Mall Creeps
