Oil Rush Review , A Real Time Strategy Game

Hello. Firstly I would like to thank Unigine Corp for providing a review copy of the game. We are very thankful to them.

Introduction

So, what exactly is the story of the game?

The game is set in “post-apocalyptic” Earth after the so called Ultimate weapon has been used. The weapon looked more like a Nuclear explosion to me.

Earth as the old guy talking to us puts it, is no longer same. There has been massive loss of lives and as the commander puts it “So much has been lost in vain, so much OIL”

The story is very fast in narration. and directly puts us in the shoes of a protagonist called Kevin. He has just come from academy and he asks the old commander for the control of a fleet and guarantees that he wont disappoint.

In most campaign maps, the objective for us is to capture more and more platforms to get more and more Oil. The capturing part is of various difficulties as we advance in the game. All platforms have various levels of defence. Merely sending out all fleet members wont help. Gathering various fleet members and sending a huge army at once might be required.

Gameplay

After a quick tutorial on what various buttons do and how to use the camera we had to attack the first fleet. The thing is from a original rig, we have to go to the nearest enemy rig to attack. What we have to do is , first select our rig (with left click) then send our fleet to attack the other rigs.

After the attack is complete on a platform, a Verticle bar fills telling us the progress of capture

What the game also allows us to do is send our fleet % wise to territories so that we can explore and find what enemy is present. Except Oil storage, each platform support 5 different types of turrets to be built around it. Building them is quite easy. All you need to do is double click the platform and voila! you are greeted with a host of options to build it.

Defensive Turrets:

A turrent trying desperately to fight off the enemy:

One thing has to be said, it would have been great if we were given more control of our fleets. That would have expanded the kind of strategy we used and how we wanted our own platforms. In this system, they either circle around our platform or on the way to attack another platform. Its not possible to redirect dynamically our fleet to any of our platform that come under attack. Fleet will have to return and then only we can go to defend our platform. There is also a radar feature which, well lets us discover things in the map. I had a bit of a hard time understanding how to use it but gradually got the hold of it.

Radar in action:

What I had to do is, I had to very regularly keep an eye on the Mini map. There were attacks all the time. The action is very fast paced. I had almost no previous experience in this Genre, but this game got me acquainted with the controls very fast and was actually kind of enjoying it.

GAMEPLAY Score – 4/5

Graphics

The graphics of the game is very very good indeed. But this is really what you would expect from a game powered by Unigine Engine. I was kind of taken aback at first by the realism of the water. Very well done indeed. Here are a few very amazing shots from their website.

The problem was my PC doesnt support DX 11. So used their screenshots here. More screenies here- Oil Rush: naval strategy game for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and PlayStation 3 We can separately choose which Direct X version to run the game (Dx 10, Dx 11, Dx 9) and even Open GL. The game gave a constant 30-33 FPS on our test setup as mentioned on botttom of review. Ran it at Medium graphics and Medium texture. Sometimes the frames dropped to 20 FPS when there was fire while attacking or defending. But the performance was constant. It was ran without V-Sync.

GRAPHICS Score – 4.5/5

Conclusion

Oil Rush is a overall good strategy game. It is quite easy to learn and designed quite simple which made even made Strategy newbies like me to play this game with lots of interest. As we play on we will master various aspects in the game like timing an attack(which is very crucial as you cant reroute when fleet is going to some target). The fast paced action makes sure you aren’t bored and the Unigine Engine is sure to throw you into awe from time to time with amazing graphics. The multiplayer is something that will definitely become a hit once the masses start playing the game. The multiplayer is copy-paste-join type. No one I knew had this game at the time of writing so could not test it out. A lobby based navigation for multiplayer would have been lot lot better. At $17.99(10% discount over original price till Feb 1) I would say the Value for money factor is there. If you are a Strategy game fan, this would certainly be your cup of Tea. Would have given the game a bit more marks if the multiplayer system would have been lobby based. But once you have friends playing this, it wont be much of a problem.

Overall – 8.5/10 | OCFreaks Advice : Must Try game!