Earth 2160 Demo Review

Hmm, what are my favorite RTS games? Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Earth 2150, The Moon Project (Earth 2150 2), Outpost 2, and Submarine Titans. Earth 2160? No, I've played about a half hour of the demo, and I can tell this is no Earth 2150 or Moon Project. I think that they shouldn't even call this Earth 2160, this is nothing remotely resembling Earth 2150 or the Moon Project. Sure, the graphics are more advanced, but after looking at The Moon Project and Earth 2160, I have to say I liked TMP better. It might be just me, but I think 2160's graphics look rather unrealistic. However, some of the tanks and vehicles look cool, but that alone can't make the game good. Also, when the people talk in the campaigns, it shows their faces blown up, and they are 110% UGLY! In the gameplay department, I noticed a few glitches that I've never really seen in RTS games, and I've played a LOT of RTS games. First of all, selecting units was REALLY annoying, sometimes when I was trying to select more units using shift, some of the others would come un-selected. I don't know about you, but to me, that gets really really annoying. The other thing that really ticked me off was when I was controlling a group and I told it to go somewhere, some of the units went the right way, but a bunch of others ignored me and went the absolute other way. By the way, going to the other way got themselves killed. That REALLY ticked me off. Those two things alone make me not want to play this game. One thing that does make this game different is some characters have inventories and you can equip different stuff to them. To me, that isn't something that belongs in an RTS. What else could go wrong? Oh yeah, it looks like don't have the unit customization anymore. That just drops this game from maybe being awesome to being nothing. This game ends up being just a average/below average RTS game. Only buy this if you have a huge need to play a space RTS, even then try and get a copy of Earth 2150, the Moon Project, or Outpost 2. I guess this just has to do with the fact that Ubisoft isn't making it anymore, Midway is. So based on the demo, I give Earth 2160 2 bad RTS games out of 5. Don't waste your time downloading the 360MB download file. That's it everyone, I am off to play the Moon Project.

-Ton