Perimeter: Emperor's Testament

I can’t believe that it has already been two years since Perimeter came upon the gaming scene. This was one of the first truly innovative real-time strategy games to come out for the PC in a very long time. What the game allowed you to do is terraform the land around you, which allowed you to come up with plenty of strategies to use against your enemies.  The reason why you have to terraform the land in the first place is in order for the nanotechnology to work; the land must be at the “Zero-Layer.” Besides raising or lowering the land level for energy extraction, players can use this for strategic purposes, such as setting traps for the enemies.

This expansion takes up shortly after the first game ends. The story so far is about humanity's descendants that are traveling through a dimension known as the Psycho-sphere. They started this journey thousands of years ago with the guidance of a race known as the Spirits. So the humans created huge flying cites that held hundreds of thousands of people called Frames through this dimension. As time passed on three factions evolved: the Harkbacks, who wanted to go back to Earth; Empire who wanted a permanent home in this dimension; and the Exodus who wanted to find a completely new home for the people.

Since the end of the first game, the Exodus has left, but the other two are still at each other’s throats trying to destroy one another. To help the Empires ambitions, a Mechanical Spirit is created to help find and colonize the sponge worlds in this dimension. While doing this various mysterious Frames dating back several centuries, as well as an alien race, are found. Do you have what it takes to survive? This game will take you through up to 25 mission to find the answer to this question.

One thing that I really like about this game is its resource management. Unlike many games where you have to constantly keep track of water, oil, gold, trees, food, and many other variations of this, Perimeter: Emperor’s Testament players only have to worry about land where you collect the energy on it to create your various units to help your cause. This makes the game really unique because you are constantly terraforming the land, and it also helps distinguish this game from the other games on the market.

Another thing about this game is how you create your units. There are only three: soldiers, officers, and technicians. From there it depends on what various research facilities you have created to merge and morph these three unit types to create a wide variety of units to use in the battle, such as helicopters, tanks, rockets, and much more. You can play several games and not see the same type of units, which is always a good thing and helps out the replayability of it.

I pulled out the original game to compare the graphics between the two and they look pretty much the same. While this is not a bad thing, since the original game really pushed the limits of your PC back in 2004, it just can’t compare to some of the games that have been released recently. But this might likely be tweaked more since the developers still have plenty of time before this game is released upon the masses.

After playing the demo of this game it has certainly whet my appetite to check out the final game to be released over here. If this game holds up as it has thus far, it will be a good winter for RTS gamers.