The Tone Rebellion may become the real-time strategy sleeper hit of this holiday season. Its intelligent and innovative design; subtle, finely tuned strategy; and unique, fanciful setting and creatures combine to create engaging and enthralling entertainment. Just about every element within it presents a new twist on what has now become a fairly predictable PC gaming category.
The Tone Rebellion plays out in a mystical island world inhabited by peaceful "floaters," bulbous, gravity-defying tentacled beings. These luminescent orbs harvest "tone" from sparkling liquid pools to build structures and ascribe strength, dazzling weaponry, and magical skills to selected floaters. Unbeknownst to the floaters, a leviathan has been lurking beneath the tone pools, gaining strength. Finally, it and its many minions emerge, killing most of the floaters and splitting their world into 15 tiny islands. There, the remaining floaters, living in secrecy, evolve into four diverse species.
This is when the game begins. It is your task to lead one of those four groups in a rebellion against the leviathan. As with most rebellions, you start small, barely eliciting a defensive response from the enemy. As you increase in strength, so do the leviathan's rejoinders. You begin with a small contingent of floaters whose first task is to harvest tone. And right off the bat the strategic subtleties kick in. Tone has several unique characteristics, changes in which can dramatically turn the tide against you. Soon your structures train small groups of floaters to defend your base or cast magic healing and combative spells. Your goal is to rid your home islet of all leviathan-spawned beings, then build a glittering bridge to a neighboring islet and continue your extermination there.
As you proceed you'll discover artifacts - adventure game-like physical puzzle pieces. These artifacts provide you with historic strengths once part of the floater culture. Your final battle will be against the leviathan itself and will require all those strengths.
After selecting your floater clan - each of which has unique strategic characteristics - you begin each game by choosing from five difficulty levels and seven, 11, or 15 islands. In single-player games you'll encounter other clans' structures, but you are essentially on your own. In multiplayer games you'll work with up to three other players to defeat the leviathan, but there may be times you'll want to turn against your allies. Just another example of this game's inherent strategic subtleties.
Gameplay begins in an atypical three-quarter top-down single-screen view. The map eventually opens to a wide-angle diorama as your tone "spreaders" expand your territory. Relative to other major real-time strategy games, The Tone Rebellion's islets are small and shallow, only about four screens wide with no depth. But each one is gorgeous and full of visually exciting animated creatures and features. There also aren't all that many floater or leviathan units, about 20 per side. But as both sides gain experience they reach higher skill levels. Plus your floaters can eventually conjure up 20 different magic spells. You quickly realize that gameplay variations are too numerous to calculate.
The Tone Rebellion breaks no new visual technological ground. The creatures are 2D sprites (with a 3D look) and there are no cool video cutscenes. But the gameplay is such a pleasantly surprising departure from the norm, you probably won't notice. Plus, the evocative soundtrack, which adjusts to fit the mood of the moment, dramatically enhances gameplay.
The game does cry out for explanation and you will find little in the manual or by using the online help function. The manual's tutorial outlines the "how" but leaves out the "why." With so many complexities, that oversight makes for a tougher learning curve. But playing at the easiest level serves as something of a self-directed tutorial.
With its original play style and mix of genres, The Tone Rebellion is the type of game that won't appeal to everyone - but it stands a good chance of spawning an ever-growing, very loyal following.
