Perimeter Hands-On Impressions

During a recent visit to Codemasters' E3 booth we were able to spend a little time with the finished European version of Perimeter, an innovative futuristic real-time strategy game scheduled for release in North America in June. As we've stated in our previous coverage of the game, Perimeter will be very different from any other real-time strategy game on the market when it arrives in stores, and so, with that in mind, we opted to play through one of the game's tutorial missions rather than jump right into a heated battle with the AI, which we're told is tough to beat.

As it turned out the tutorial mission took us under 10 minutes to complete, but it was long enough for us to get a feel for the game's controls and to try out a couple of the different unit types that you'll have at your disposal in the game. The first thing we were instructed to do was to flatten an area of land so that we could place an energy extractor adjacent to our base. To achieve this all we had to do was select the terraforming tool, "paint" the area we wanted flattened, and then watch as our nanobots came out of the base and moved the earth around. We noticed that in areas where the bots had to raise the land rather than eat away at it they were having to go and collect material from other areas of the map, leaving small craters behind.

Once our base had power we were told to place a soldier factory and then to test our base's perimeter shield, which, of course, worked just fine but was a pretty major drain on the energy we were harvesting with only a single extractor. After placing a second extractor we set about constructing three basic soldiers known as nano-officers, which, using the game's innovative unit morphing system, we were then able to combine to create a single sniper unit.

At this point we were told that an infestation of spiderlike insects to the north of our base posed a threat, and we sent our sniper to investigate. We found that the selection and movement of units in Perimeter is handled in much the same way as in other real-time strategy games, although a Codemasters representative at the booth pointed out that ordinarily we'd be selecting large groups of up to 250 units to give orders to rather than an individual unit. When the sniper unit was selected, its weapon range was indicated onscreen with a red outline--allowing us to easily position it a safe distance from its targets. Once all the spiders had been defeated, the tutorial ended, and, unfortunately, it was time for us to move on to our next appointment. It won't be long before we get our hands on a copy of Perimeter (it's scheduled for release in Europe next week), and since it's looking very promising, you can definitely expect more coverage soon.