Machines

I like strategy games, but I have to be honest: after a while, a lot of them start feeling like I am playing the same game with different buildings. Build base. Harvest stuff. Make units. Send units. Watch little idiots get stuck behind each other. Repeat until someone’s base explodes.

Machines tries to do something different, and for that alone I wanted to like it before I even installed it.

The whole pitch is simple and cool: take a real-time strategy game, make the whole thing 3D, then let the player jump down into the battlefield and directly control individual units from first-person or third-person view. That is the kind of idea that sounds like it was invented at two in the morning by someone surrounded by empty soda cans, and I mean that as a compliment. Machines wants to be the big war-room strategy game and the robot action game at the same time.

Sometimes it actually pulls that off.

From the overhead view, this is familiar RTS territory. You build units, manage production, research upgrades, and try to stomp the other side before they stomp you. The difference is that the terrain is fully 3D and the camera is not locked into one boring angle. You can pull back, rotate around, and look at the battlefield like an actual place instead of a flat board with sprites sliding across it.

The first time I jumped into a machine and started blasting from the ground level, I grinned like an idiot.

It changes the whole feel of the battle. From above, your units are pieces. From the ground, they are big ugly metal monsters throwing weapons fire across hills and buildings. You suddenly notice line of sight, terrain, and scale in a way most RTS games do not make you notice. A fight that looked like two blobs chewing on each other from the sky becomes a messy firefight when you are inside one of the units. That is where Machines is at its best. It makes the battlefield feel like somewhere you can actually enter.

The machines themselves are a big part of the fun. The game has a pile of different robotic units with different movement styles and weapon types. The tech side gives you enough to mess with that you do not feel like you are just building tank, bigger tank, and biggest tank. There are walkers, flying units, tracked units, and other mechanical weirdos, and the best part is that they actually look like machines built for war instead of colorful cartoon army men.

The problem is that ambition and execution are not the same thing.

Machines has moments where it feels ahead of its time, then five minutes later it trips over something basic. Unit control can be clumsy. Pathfinding is not always your friend. There are times where you tell a unit to go somewhere and it handles that order like you asked it to solve advanced math. The camera is powerful, but it can also be fiddly when the action gets heavy. Jumping into a unit is cool, but it does not always feel as smooth as a dedicated action game. It is a great feature, but it is still living inside an RTS engine, and you can feel the seams.

The interface also takes some patience. Machines is not impossible to learn, but it is not as immediately clean as Command and Conquer or Total Annihilation. Those games understood that you need to get the player building, fighting, and making bad decisions fast. Machines asks you to wrestle with its systems a little more. Some people will enjoy that. Some people will bounce right off the metal wall.

Graphically, this thing can look really impressive. In 1999, seeing an RTS battlefield built out in full 3D still has some punch. The textures are not always beautiful and it can get visually busy, but the scale sells it. When you are down on the ground and a machine is stomping past you while weapons fire is coming in from the distance, the whole thing looks like the future RTS games keep promising us. Charybdis and Acclaim deserve credit for not just making another flat clone with robots painted on top.

Sound is fine, but not the star. The machines sound heavy enough, the weapons have enough punch, and the battlefield has the right mechanical chaos to it. This is a game sold on concept and viewpoint more than music or voice work.

I keep coming back to the same thing: Machines is better as an idea than it is as a perfectly polished game, but the idea is good enough that I kept playing anyway. That matters. A lot of games are smooth and boring. Machines is not boring. It is awkward in places, but it is awkward because it is trying to do something bigger than the usual build-rush-click routine.

If you want the cleanest RTS on the shelf, this is not it. If you want something that takes the RTS formula, bolts a camera to a killer robot, and lets you climb inside the battle, Machines is worth a look.

It may not be the future of strategy games.

But for a few minutes at a time, when you are down there in the dirt with the rest of the machines, it sure feels like it.