The simulation/strategy genre is one where a lot of ideas, both new and old, can occasionally come together in pleasantly surprising ways, especially if these ideas offer new ways for players to plan out their moves and reap the fruits from plans that worked out.
Perimeter is one such example. Its strongest gameplay element, the ability to alter terrain into a state that is suitable for base-building, shows itself almost right away in its tutorial, which teaches the player how to level out terrain, among other important things that will be elaborated on later.
Of course, such a game design is not exactly original; it has been done before in previous games such as Populous and a lesser-known strategy game, Maelstrom. This is where the eponymous Perimeter defense shield gives the game another gameplay element that is almost as strong as its other one.
Although the Perimeter shield is not as instrumental and critical to the game as the player's ability to mold terrain, it is the most powerful defensive system that the player can have, and more importantly, it is available right from the start of any session. This gives fledgling players a method to prevent early-game raids and is still useful late-game.
In Perimeter, the player must perform what is called "terraforming", which is really the digging-up or filling-in of earth to level out terrain into nice, flat plateaus. To start, the player needs to designate which expanse of terrain that the player wants flattened by dragging a simple cursor across it. The actual digging is performed by drones that resemble flying excavators, and given enough time and enough drones, they can level out terrain for the player to build buildings on.
Not all terrain can be altered, however. Some terrain are either too immense for the drones to remove, such as mountains, or simply too hard and dense for excavation. This will be apparent to the player when he/she attempts to flag these regions for removal.
Flattened-out terrain does not stay that way, however. All kinds of occurrences, and in fact, many units in the game, can cause said terrain to be damaged, as will be elaborated on later. Messed-up terrain do not just look ugly though - they also have very interesting gameplay ramifications, which warrant further elaboration that will be done later.
The player's drones will attempt to maintain the region that the player has designated to be terraformed. Considering that the player can only have so many drones, the player cannot maintain a region that is too large to defend. This will have a lot of strategic consequences, which an avid strategy game veteran would appreciate.
The developers have also added some sense of conservation of mass to this feature; the drones will have to find earth from elsewhere to fill out terrain below the 'zero' level of terrain, where all artificially flattened terrain occur. They also accumulate loads of earth as they gouge out terrain higher than zero level, and will have to dump these elsewhere before they can continue excavations.
Although these physics considerations contribute to the immersion of the game, it is hampered by AI scripting that does not make for efficient filling out of land. Drones will not excavate terrain that is not within the region designated by the player, if said terrain is lower than the zero-level, of course; instead, they excavate the terrain just outside the designated region to obtain the earth needed to perform land-filling.
This results in longer land-filling work if the player extends the region onto these locations in the near-future, because these locations are now deeper and thus require more earth to be plugged.
The same also occurs for excavation of terrain higher than zero level. Drones that have taken full loads of earth will dump these just outside of the designated zones, causing delays later when the player attempts to flatten these locations.
Despite the feature of conservation of mass, there is a work-around when the drones cannot gain the earth needed to perform land-fills; they return to their parent unit to get the earth needed. However, this game design is not mentioned in any way in the game, causing the player to learn the hard way that the drones' parent units should be sent to as close as possible to the region that is to be terraformed.
Once terrain has been leveled out, the player can erect buildings on it and more importantly, have space for the player to ground their Frames on.
Frames are buildings that can be best described as the headquarters of a player's forces. They are huge, ungainly structures that the player needs to protect and has close to other buildings to render them active, operable and under the control of the player. Frames also generate some of the main resource in the game, which is Energy, but only after being grounded (or "installed", as the game puts it); otherwise, they actually drain Energy to stay aloft.
Frames can regain lost hit-points very quickly if they are damaged and those that are aloft can be brought over to other places of the map in play; these game designs can be used for many strategies, and the single-player campaign will emphasize them. Frames can also stay aloft indefinitely even if the player runs out of Energy, but they move a lot slower and lose their ability to regenerate hitpoints, thus making them vulnerable to destruction.
This is where the player's economy comes in, to prevent such a disaster. The player can deploy units known as Buildmasters (in addition to the units that harbor the drones), which can produce expendable drones to send over to build sites. The most important of these buildings is the Energy Core, which is the only building (other than the frame) that can produce Energy. It is also needed to power close-by buildings, such as Factories, among other functions that would only be evident in the single-player campaign.
The Energy Cores, together with the Frame, will exude zones that not only show the extent of their capability to power buildings, but also how far the aforementioned Perimeter defense shield would reach; the Perimeter shield will only be generated from these buildings, so having these nearby to protect other buildings will be an important strategic consideration, as a player will discover when he/she realizes how vulnerable buildings that are not protected by the shield are.
For additional protection of a player's holdings beyond that provided by the Perimeter shield, the player can create defensive towers that are quite effective at defending against early-game rushes, provided that the player has placed them at critically strategic locations in his/her base. However, there are many units that have longer range than most defensive towers, or have capabilities that can bypass or dodge towers, such as aerial units being able to go past Laser turrets, most units being capable of dodging the shells of Howitzers and some units being able to tunnel underneath most towers.
(It is worth noting here that while offensive plan can be performed through subterranean means, e.g. via tunneling units, there are very specialized towers that are capable of firing into the ground to counter these.)
Buildings that are not close to sources of energy will shut-down, becoming completely useless. More importantly, these inactive structures will also lose their allegiances; any other player that manages to settle his/her/its Energy Cores near these will be able to usurp control over them.
Furthermore, all Energy Cores must be connected to a player's Frame; otherwise, they deactivate, becoming vulnerable to nearby opposing Energy Cores, or Frames, if the enemy is particularly daring.
A player can only flatten so much terrain and build so many Energy Cores before other pressing needs require the player to extend further beyond his/her immediate region of flattened terrain. This is where Transmitters come in handy; Transmitters allow the connection of chains of Energy Cores together over longer distances, though they are especially vulnerable to destruction and usurpation; any nearby opposing Energy Core can easily take over them.
The designs that govern the control of bases in Perimeter open a lot of strategies that players would not find in many other RTS games. Usurpation of enemy buildings is also the most expedient way to defeat opponents, because destroying enemy bases is practically a battle of attrition that is just not as fun.
Regardless of the strategies that the player will use, he/she will have to expend Energy to create armies, though this of course would not be something new to strategy game veterans. However, the armies in Perimeter are not as typical as in other RTS games.
There are three factories that the player will have to build, one for each kind of basic unit: Soldiers, Technicians, and Officers.
Soldiers are as their names suggest: they are meant for battle. However, considering that they are basic level units, their usefulness runs out very quickly.
Technicians are incapable of combat, but they are one of very few units that are capable of repairing other units. A wise player would bring some of these along, but only after realizing that the game does not inform the player of their usefulness beyond their description in the manual and in-game tool-tip.
The Officers do not appear to do much, but are needed anyway for a game feature that makes Perimeter very different from other RTS games.
These three basic units can be combined to create other units with very different names and functions, namely more powerful combat-capable units. The lower-tier units only need small bunches of basic units to be created, such as the Sniper that only needs a few Officers to be created. The higher-tier ones can need a tremendous mixture of basic units, such as the faction-specific units.
While this is not an entirely original game design, it is a rare one, and even rarer for being effectively implemented.
With this game feature in mind, the player will have to build a suitable ratio of Factories to produce basic units to be in turn converted into more advanced units without a problem. He/She may even have to create clusters of Factories just to have their output going to a specific location to be combined into a specific type of advanced units.
To obtain more advanced units and certain defensive structures, the player will have to build Labs and upgrade them. These serve to unlock combination recipes for units and make available the building of towers, but do little more. They happen to be large buildings, are expensive to upgrade and there can ever be only one of each kind of Lab; these make the player vulnerable to raids that target Labs, as their destruction means that the player temporarily loses the ability to obtain advanced units.
Such game designs are ages-old, and it may disappoint strategy veterans who find them tiresome.
There are three factions in the game, called the HarkBack, Empire and Exodus. They have virtually no difference in their gameplay fundamentals; they also share virtually all structures and many units, though these have different cosmetic designs.
To obtain faction-specific units, the player will have to build these factions' specific Labs, and defend these from being destroyed, or worse, taken over (in which case the player who captured the lab will be able to build the units that these Labs unlock, giving them a tremendous edge in versatility). In return for this added vulnerability in a player's strategic assets, he/she will gain surprisingly powerful units that can wreck bases or even armies very quickly.
To cite some examples, the Empire's Piercers may be practically one-shot munitions, but they are tunneling monsters that can severely wreck bases and are practically unstoppable once they dig; the Exodus's Scum Heaters are satellites that can microwave huge tracts of land and possibly annihilate armies that did not take precautions to avoid being bunched together; and the Harkback has units that summon uncontrollable monsters (collectively known as the Scourge) to scour bases with.
Combining basic units is not a one-way transformation though. Advanced units can be broken down into their basic units, just in case the player no longer needs them but needs the constituent units to form other more urgently needed units instead. To prevent exploitation of this feature, the damage that advanced units have incurred will translate to losses of basic units when they are broken down. Players who have brought along a contingent of Technicians to repair these advanced units before they are broken down are not necessarily performing a work-around either, because they will have lost valuable time. (More advanced units also take longer time to repair.)
Regardless of their type, all units are practically capable of hovering over virtually any terrain, even if they are not aerial units. However, terrain irregularities can result in land units (with the exception of terraforming drones) having their hit-boxes trapped in chasms, gullies and ditches, in which cases they will be rapidly damaged to the point of destruction.
A skeptical player's first impression of this game design would be that the developers have implemented a very convenient solution to prevent units from being permanently trapped due to collision issues, but this also deliberately opened up interesting tactical possibilities, such as having units with explosive attacks dig up ditches to line and protect the flanks of a player's claimed territory.
The user interface is somewhat satisfactory for the act of combining units: there is a panel containing buttons for every possible unit combination. However, if the player can gain access to many Labs, there can be a rather unmanageable number of buttons. There are shortcut keys for a specific unit combination, but these are all unmapped by default, thus requiring the player to assign keys to these. Unfortunately, the default key mapping has already used a tremendous number of keys on the keyboard, such that the player would be inconveniencing himself/herself anyway if he/she has to overwrite key mappings just to accommodate a unit combination.
Perhaps the worst thing about the design of units is their unit descriptions and names. 1C Company was not exactly known for very good localization practices, and Perimeter is not a departure from this reputation.
Only the manual and out-of-game documentation have adequate descriptions of the units and how they function in the game; the in-game tool-tips only contain the requirements that lead to their availability. The effectiveness of their English names at giving an idea of what they are supposed to do is all over the place. For example, the aforementioned name for the "Scum Heater" would suggest quite well that it has microwave weaponry, but another unit, called the "Scummer", has a name that does not exactly suggest its function. One more example is the aptly-named "Buildmaster", whereas the parent unit of excavator drones is called the "Brigadier", oddly enough for a unit that is not meant to have military capacities.
The game has single-player and multiplayer modes, with the the latter being where the best qualities of the game can be experienced most satisfactorily. The former, consisting of a single-player campaign, may not be as enjoyable, unfortunately.
The single-player campaign was meant to elaborate on the premise of the game and how they justified the gameplay designs mentioned earlier. It started off seemingly so enough.
The game takes place in a fictional universe where apparently human-looking beings, who call themselves the "People", have sequestered themselves into vast, mobile colonies known as Frames. This is a necessity, as the universe as they know it is now overrun by hostile and antagonistic creatures known as the Scourge.
The player character is introduced as a newly assigned commander/representative of the Cluster Frame, with the title of "Legate". The Legate starts his career by learning how to use the facilities of the Frame, its ever-loyal drones and the external buildings which are connected to it for the benefit of the Frame and its people.
The few levels after the first give exposition on the plight of the People, as well as their history of space travel under the guidance of their supposed creators, the Spirits. The story would appear to be progressing quite smoothly, with plenty of interesting exposition on the Perimeter canon. Then, it takes a confusing path of progression.
The game does not introduce the three factions in the game with distinct clarity; instead of sequencing missions for each faction into contiguous strings, the story switches to and fro between the first protagonist and other protagonists that represent the will of the other two factions. These other protagonists are not introduced well too, and all share the same title, "Legate", at least initially. Such a story design makes the plot twists seem confounding.
It would take a while for the player to realize that the plot twists are meant to reveal the schisms among the People, which in turn gave rise to the other two factions beside the Exodus, and how these two eventually diverge from the original one in both ideals and military capabilities. Unfortunately, said twists are presented in a manner that can be considered disjointed; the player would never know which faction that he/she would fight for in the next mission, until the person that would perform the mission briefing appears.
The exposition of the story also appears to be somewhat affected by voice-acting of dubious quality. Even considering the canon that the People are different from the humans as we know ourselves to be despite them looking like us, their voices are often monotonous, and sometimes dead-pan. This extends to the voice-overs for the Frame, Brigadier and Buildmaster units.
If a player is looking for a well-told story, then he/she has to be warned that Perimeter doesn't have one.
Some missions in the campaign are designed such that completing them must be done exactly as what the mission briefing has recommended; attempting to use other methods would otherwise lead to failure. Missions also introduce new units, which need to be used to achieve victory. Yet, the player is not told exactly what these units do until he/she has used them or at least read their entry in the manual, as has been alluded to in a complaint earlier.
In addition, the player is also not informed of certain crucial steps that need to be taken before victory can be achieved. For example, the game fails to tell the player that in missions concerning opposing Frames, the player will have to force the Frames to detach from the planet's surface before any victory condition can be achieved.
There may be a tutorial, but it is apparently not enough to teach a player all the things that he/she needs to know to win, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some missions have scripting issues with displaying the text for the statement of objectives. Text may be missing, and the player cannot easily scroll down the panel of objectives to examine them more closely.
It should be apparent already that there is some trial-and-error to be had with some missions. Players with little persistence may not put up with such hurdles though.
These are not the only issues affecting the single-player campaign. Another example of a severe issue is that the launch version of the game "forgets" any group assignment to bunches of units when a saved game is reloaded. This can be a huge problem if the player needs to reload a saved game frequently due to mishaps that could have been avoided.
Many of the missions in the single-player campaign require a tremendous amount of patience, because many of them involve arduous battles (especially against other Frames, which are usually already well-established) and/or painstaking struggles against hostile environments and the ever-respawning Scourge. The latter cases take place on maps with plenty of event triggers, which are often detrimental to the player and require careful minding, lest the player triggers events that he/she is not able to manage.
Nevertheless, the single-player campaign has some noteworthy moments. The missions that have the player facing the Scourge and geologically unstable worlds are the highlights of the campaign.
In these missions, the player will have to move the Frame under his/her control towards a destination, while stabilizing locations in the map that are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, among other upheavals, by flattening them out and building Energy Cores on them. Some others have the player facing waves of automatically spawned Scourge monsters, which have to be kept at bay with the erection of static defense lines, or even better (and if possible), through neutralization of their spawning zones (by, again, building Energy Cores onto these).
The multiplayer mode does not have the variety that the single-player campaign has, though this is not meant to say that the variety in the single-player mode is all good. For multiplayer, there are only two match types: free-for-all and team battles, which are very standard fare. Considering the terrain-altering gameplay of Perimeter, some match modes could have been made to focus on this, but these just are not in the official version of the game.
Graphics-wise, Perimeter is not a game that pushes the limits of video processing at the time.
Most of the worlds in the Perimeter universe happen to be so otherworldly that the map designers have the excuse of making most of them look rather bland; most maps consist of rolling hills and plateaus with little terrain features in the way of trees and foliage.
There are attempts to make maps look more interesting, at least from the onset of a match, such as including fearsome mountains and sheer cliffs that restrict expansion. Some maps also have peculiar features, such as bizarre formations of what appear to be polyps and gaping mouths, while some others have textures that resemble murals and sculpted terrain that make for believable bas reliefs. However, the aesthetic qualities of these artistic innovations are lost as soon as the player expands onto these terrain features: the excavation drones will level them away, reducing them to a flat surface with a shining sheen.
The game makes use of decals to depict minor alteration of terrain, such as cracks that appear when earthquakes (natural or otherwise) occur and craters for explosions; the application of these decals are gradual, but there are no intermediary animations, thus making them look awkward to discerning players. The animations for land-filling and excavation are also not smooth.
The graphical designs for units and buildings have less hitches. The units and buildings in Perimeter are composed of bland-textured polygons, but most units have plenty to mask the visual primitiveness. They are sparsely animated, but the animations are quite smooth, especially for Scourge monsters and aerial units.
Yet, despite the apparent simplicity of unit animations and their polygonal make-up, the launch version of Perimeter has frame-rate issues when too many non-Scourge units are in the map. They do not even need to be on-screen; the dip in frame-rate will occur as soon as certain numbers of units present in the map have been reached. There is a hard-cap on units that any player can make, but this hard-cap is more effective when there is only a single player in the map.
Later patches fixed this issue somewhat, but it still gives the impression that not enough play-testing has been done.
The audio designs of the game are perhaps second to the story designs in poorness.
The sound effects of the game are a less problematic segment of the sound designs: every unit has sound effects that give satisfactory complementary audio to whatever it is doing, be it firing its weapons or exploding in death. There are no grating audio clips that are too jarring for the player's peace of mind.
The same cannot be said of the voice-overs though. The efficacy of the voice-over for the story mode has already been elaborated earlier, but it is during a match when the player will realize just how poorly implemented it is.
There are only ever two voices that accompany and highlight important occurrences in the game: a female droning voice, and a male one, also droning. There are many occurrences that the game consider important: Energy Cores being damaged, Transmitters being destroyed, the Frame being assaulted, etc.
These should be well and good, except that the game will ceaselessly play the announcements for these occurrences one after the other in a consecutive manner. For example, if the player suffered a setback that results in dozens of Energy Cores being damaged, the male voice-over will announce that an Energy Core is being damaged for each and every Core that is affected. In fact, if the player can suffer so many of such setbacks, the queue for announcements can get so long such that the audio may become unstable.
The soundtracks are not as bland as the voice-overs, but they are not remarkable either. They are mostly composed of electronic scores with unimpressive tempo, and do not accentuate cutscenes in the story mode well or add any aural flavour to the gameplay.
In conclusion, Perimeter has interestingly different gameplay designs that are rarely seen in RTS games of its time, but its aural presentation and story leave much to be desired.