Etherium (PC) Review

Old school gameplay meets some new RTS ideas in Etherium.

Etherium is an RTS developed by Tindalos Interactive and published by Focus Home Interactive which I’d heard a bit of buzz about a few months back, so when I heard we got a copy to review I was super excited and jumped onto the opportunity. In this review I’m going to try to cover everything I feel is important to know, make some comparisons to games that have released within the last few months, and discuss what I’ve discovered about game play.

The game revolves around Etherium, which is probably the reason it’s called Etherium, right? So… what is Etherium exactly? It is the resource that powers everything, or something along those lines, and the races of the galaxy are constantly fighting each other over it.

There’s three different factions in total, who are all vying for power: The Consortium, the Intar, and the Vectide Empire, and each has special units, attributes, and skills. The lore is that the Consortium is a militaristic led mega corporation and their description says that the group “employs rapid attack techniques to surprise it’s opponents.”

The Intar are an ancient peoples who utilize extra-dimensional creatures and can see into the future, “making them formidable elite warriors on the battlefield.” And finally, the Vectide Empire, who’ve confined their consciousness into life cells, which are fueled by, you guessed it, Etherium. This in turn has made their civilization 100% dependent on Etherium.

For single player, your options are either Conquest mode, or skirmish against AI. The AI is fairly challenging too, especially as a new player. However they tend to enact some questionable, in my opinion, strategies from time to time. In the Conquest mode you have a tech tree, which unlocks not only more powerful units, but also upgraded defensive and offensive structures, as well as logistics structures. Each faction has their own version of a tech tree; there are a lot of similar units and buildings, but here is where their race specific units come into focus.

I would gladly like to report in all my time playing thus far, the game has not crashed on me, nor have I noticed any bugs. The only bug in fact was that when I went to give my save a name, it kept backspacing, making it impossible to give it a name that wasn’t gibberish.

One thing I really like about this game too, is that all the maps/planets have unique weather conditions. If the map is a desert for example, every X amount of time there will be a massive sandstorm, which limits the amount of functions you can do, certainly something that can be incorporated into your strategy.

This really helps reduce static game play, while also adding something you have to pay attention too, because it can screw you over if you’re not expecting it. In this case you can’t build certain buildings, or ship in more units. This is because you’re invading a planet from a massive ship, and sending down reinforcements to try to gain total control. This in itself adds another way to win.

Rather than just defeating your own enemies main base to win, at a certain technological point in Conquest or if you build up your tech high enough (there’s buildings for this) in skirmish, you can build a building which will fire at the opponents main battle station every few (I think it’s 30) seconds, and this can really load on the pressure.

My one gripe with the game is that the UI is not very intuitive, and some of the default controls make you scratch your head. It’s hard to tell if something is a UI element, or if it’s just artwork. Most of the items don’t have any sort of text on them, but there is information if you hover over them.

The game also has 3 ‘minor’ factions, each one can be turned to help you by converting a specific building type to them, which in turn starts a timer. This of course has a benefit, but it also is expensive early in the game and can leave you defenseless or severely weakened. The AI tends to love trying to rush building conversions in Conquest mode.

When you’re not battling over planets in Conquest, you’ll be at the main turn phase system. Each turn you have 5 action points. Actions can be things like raising a fleet to attack, attacking a planet or zone on a planet, attacking an enemy fleet, drawing more cards, and so on. The cards mechanic is quite enjoyable, as it gives the game a tabletop feel. They range from resetting a unit’s action points, to getting points to spend in the tech tree, and attack bonuses.

Moving onto the looks, well, the graphics in this game certainly aren’t the main focus, and you can tell pretty graphics were pushed aside for game play. For a long time I’ve been an advocate that graphics don’t make the game, at most they only enhance the game, and that’s IF the game itself has a solid foundation beneath it.

Earlier in the year we got a copy of Grey Goo, which was a beautiful game, but so far I prefer the game play of Etherium to Grey Goo. At times GG looked and felt too much like Star Craft, while you can tell Etherium is really trying to give this genre a kick start so it’s no longer a niche market. Essentially that’s a long winded statement to say that the graphics are okay, but not groundbreaking. They serve their purpose, and I can respect that.

In terms of audio, it’s well done, and I really like the sound effects. However it is plagued by a similar thing I disliked with Grey Goo, in that units are constantly babbling, or your refineries are complaining about being attacked. I haven’t actually looked into a workaround, to see if maybe they can be muted or reduced in frequency, but there’s been times where I’ve had to mute the game to keep my sanity.

If you’re really into lore, each faction has a bit of background information in the Conquest setup screen, but also each faction has their own intro cut scene. Not something that I’m going to add or subtract ‘points’ for, but some people really enjoy lore and back story. If you skip the cut scene have no fear, because there is a Lexicon which contains all the information again, except someone isn’t narrating it to you.

Now to the cost of Etherium. It’s only $32 CAD, which I feel fits nicely into the cost:entertainment scale. Currently I have just over 10 hours into the game, and will definitely be playing more. So theoretically, it’s $3/hour and dropping, not to mention I haven’t even touched multi player yet.

Since press members got copies of the game pre-release, there was only 1 time I saw a lobby on multiplayer, and I got kicked almost instantaneously after joining in. This is something I am really looking forward to getting into now though, that there will be more people to play with. It’s not a super popular game when it comes to streaming, but again, I’m sure the community will begin it’s growth now that the game is actually a released product.

Final Thoughts

I’m going to give this game a 7.5/10, which is still definitely a buy. As much as I really enjoy the game, I’m taking away ‘points’ for the unit message spam (audio) and the graphics. Although I stated graphics don’t make a game, they can certainly enhance and they just don’t do that here.

I also intend to add to this review in the future, once I get some multi player experience under my belt- so check back for that!