A New Trailer Of Unigine's OilRush Linux Game

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A New Trailer Of Unigine's OilRush Linux Game

Just in time for the weekend, the Russian developers at Unigine Corp have released a new (and impressive) trailer of their OilRush game with native clients for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTU1OA

[allquixotic]

The trailer is awesome. It really grabs you and brings you into the universe of oil rush. It does a much better job of that than playing mindless skirmish matches.

However, exactly as I predicted before this game was released, the campaign so far is underwhelming. It would take 1 - 2 years of intensive production to crank out a campaign of Starcraft 2 or Red Alert 3 quality. If they can't match that quality, it isn't worth it to me. And it looks like they won't even come close.

Edit: I still might find the mechanics compelling for a while, to play multiplayer or whatever, but I get bored of plot-free skirmishes against the AI very quickly, and multiplayer RTS isn't all that interesting to me either. The only way I could really appreciate the mechanics would be if the campaign drew me into it. But the campaign is average for an RTS, and most RTS campaigns are pretty bad.

Let's put it this way: not all games in the C&C series have had a particularly good campaign, but overall, C&C campaign storylines are what I'd call "above average" for an RTS (Red Alert 3 was extra-awesome imho). Starcraft 2 is pretty much the epitome of fantastic RTS campaigning. If Oil Rush's campaign could come even close to one of the less interesting C&C series campaigns (say, C&C 2), I'd still love it.

[smitty3268]

Oil Rush doesn't cost $60

It's unrealistic to expect it to match games that do.

[allquixotic]

It's unrealistic to expect it to match games that do.

I'd pay $100 for a Linux-native game with the graphics quality of Unigine that could have a story and campaign design even somewhat close to RA3 or SC2.

Asking price isn't an excuse. If anything, their sales numbers (pathetic) are a reasonable excuse. But the sales numbers are kind of bad because of how cheaply the game was designed (3d rendering quality aside), so it's kind of chicken and egg here.

Needed a very large up-front investment to hire a bunch of artists and producers, to execute a better campaign design. But they didn't go big. And so the game feels very "indie" despite having a good engine. It's a waste of an engine imo.

[smitty3268]

The game IS indie

They are a small company, not someone who can afford to create a AAA title.

[Kano]

I would not pay 20$ for such a small only online available game - 5$ would be more than enough. The biggest drawback is that you can not even test it without paying the full price. Unigine calls it "pre-order", but selling alpha/beta versions is no good style in my opinion. When the user has to hack the game first to get it running on a recent system after paying for it then something is going completely wrong. One other thing is that i usally like to get boxes, i collect (single player) id games for example - also unreal games. If there is a Linux client out there i get it sooner otherwise later, but always i get something i can put into my shelf. As long as the game does not require online activation it definitely feels better to be able to sell it if needed.

[Qaridarium]

They are a small company, not someone who can afford to create a AAA title.

there are other small company's with good games to like Bohemia interactive.

sure a small company can build a AAA title like OFP or ARMA2 ;-)

[JDShu]

Nice to see that we've progressed from "people don't make games for Linux" to "people don't make games as good as Starcraft 2 for Linux." Awesome.

[smitty3268]

Yeah, to be clear

I'm not buying the game. It seems to me like Unigine is really only interested in using the game to market their game engine, rather than in becoming a real game company. So it's no surprise that the game isn't exactly blowing anyone's socks off.

But complaining that the game isn't as good as Starcraft and that's the minimum required to get your money? 99.999% of Windows games don't measure up to that standard. And certainly no indie game for a $15 price ever has.

This is meant to be a tower defense game anyway. So you should be comparing it to something like Plants vs Zombies, not Starcraft.

[wstorm]

there are other small company's with good games to like Bohemia interactive.

sure a small company can build a AAA title like OFP or ARMA2 ;-)

ARMA2 is flashpoint clone? looks worse than some open source games, actually. Setting is terrible. Why not WW3, why they ressurect USSR's corpse? Flashpoint was good, but that local conflicts are just booooring. I had never finished this kind of games