There’s nothing inherently awful about Red Orb’s Warbreeds. It’s a competent title, but it’s lost in a sea of similar RTS games. And as you play more and more, there’s that creeping suspicious that you’d rather be playing Starcraft.
To give credit where it’s due, Warbreeds is innovative in several areas, though not enough to make the game very fun. Each clan has distinct skills and abilities, and through resource management, creating new units and buildings, and waging war, each tries to gain control of the alien planet. Unit customization is where the actual innovation lies – the manual claims over 35.000 possible combinations of several basic units types fitted with a variety of weapons. When you create new units, you’re essentially building them as you would a Mech.
Unit selection, orders, and grouping are all done with the left mouse button. Simple waypoint orders and artificial intelligence stances such as harass, aggressive, normal, withdraw, and hold can be given to groups and individuals. Resources (pods and spores) are planted and harvested, rather than mined, and provide energy for building and controlling units. It’s all pretty straightforward and familiar.
This cool database lets you inspect buildings.
Unfortunately, it is hard to distinguish these weapons from each other. Units are so plain looking that it’s difficult to tell them apart at a glance. These weapons also don’t matter much overall, since weak AI allows your units to rush into close combat almost every time. Units not only run into danger no matter their AI setting, but also routinely get stuck. I often noticed one or more of my units trapped in a field of spores. The enemy AI is no better, making for a weak challenge all around. One moderately saving grace is that the four races are discernibly different, but again, StarCraft, Total Annihilation or Dark Reign all do it better.
System Requirements: Pentium 100 Mhz, 16 MB RAM, Win95
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Vintage Website
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