Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis Preview
It will build on a traditional real-time strategy formula and try to set itself apart with its unusual twists.
When a winning formula already exists, why try to reinvent it? That seems to be the thinking behind Ubi Soft's upcoming futuristic real-time strategy game called Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis. This game will follow the proven RTS formula of harvest, build, and conquer that's been at the core of the genre for nearly a decade. What should set the game apart is its fine attention to detail, unusual mix of forces, and vibrant graphics.
Dark Planet will play out on full-3D battlefields with 3D units. In your battle to control the verdant planet Natrolis, you'll get to fight with three different races. There are the high-tech human Colonists, the lizardlike Sorin, and insectile Dreil. Each race will get its own single-player campaign, though details of the overall story aren't clear at this stage. Suffice it to say, it will center on carnage. Multiplayer modes will let you fight up to seven other players, whether human or computer-controlled. You'll get skirmish, capture the flag, and domination modes, as well as five or so multiplayer campaigns.
Each race will have its own unique look and capacities. Colonist forces center on a control hub, a large structure whose computers and antennae provide command and control for your forces. Robotic "sapper" units will harvest rocks, crystals, and geothermal energy from the land. Sappers will also lay the groundwork for each new structure, after which a construction ship floats down from orbit and erects the new building.
By upgrading your control hub, you'll get access to new buildings, like guard towers with long-range weapons or laboratories for upgrading your forces. A lab will let you research things like Kevlar plating to boost your troops' armor rating or special gauntlets for close combat. As you upgrade the control hub, you'll also gain access to new units, like medics or commanders who boost the abilities of nearby troops. You can also develop improved training for your units, which lets you create them more rapidly.
You'll fight with a variety of combat units. Marines, for instance, are your core warriors, armed with bayoneted rifles that offer a decent blend of short- and long-range power. Sentries specialize in close-quarters combat with their powered gauntlets, but they lack ranged weapons. Gunners can cause brutal long-range destruction with their fragmentation grenades, but they'll be in trouble if the fighting gets up close and personal.
Next there are the Sorin forces, which appear more like swords-and-sorcery lizardmen than the bug-eyed aliens you might expect. Their worker units, called slave hammers, gather wood and rock from the landscape. They also harvest a more unusual resource: faith, which is gathered from killing enemies and from worshiping at the temples that lie at the core of their civilization. Sorin buildings are humble affairs constructed of wood and stone, and their main military units fight with relatively primitive weapons like lances and bows. The Sorin's true power lies in their faith. The more faith you've stockpiled, the more your priest units get to cast powerful spells, letting them heal wounded comrades or raise zombie armies, for instance.
Dark Planet: Battle for Natrolis Quick Links
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- Ubisoft
- Creative Edge
- Sci-Fi Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Mar 20, 2002
- ESRB: Teen
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