Recs.
Updated
Zero-K is a Real Time Strategy game set near the end of the universe. Manipulate the terrain, set things on fire, fight epic battles over land, air and sea. Conquer the galaxy, solo or co-op, in over 70 campaign missions. Hop online for tense 1v1 or massive battles with up to 32 players.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Realistic physics
All units and weapons obey the in-game laws of physics and collisions. Kinetic weapons gain range with altitude. Putting a turret on an artificially raised platform will make it harder to hit for enemy units. Unit counters are implemented as dodging, kiting and swarming.
There are weapons that can push, pull and even throw units around. This can be combined with terrain terraforming to make for some interesting contraptions.
Pro Smart unit micromanagement
There are many ways to automate unit behavior, leaving tedious tasks to the AI and turning micro from a clicking contest into another level of strategic play.
Fast units will automatically dodge slow projectiles and swarm their enemy. Long ranged units will keep their distance to prevent enemies from closing in and returning fire. There is a command to automatically retreat, repair and reengage. Expensive robots can be protected from cloaked assassins by telling cheaper units to form a circle around them. Engaged units will automatically focus fire on the most valuable enemy, but also spread their focus if it would lead to overkill.
Pro Non cheating AI Opponent
The AI difficulties differentiate themselves in their decision-making instead of cheats or unit stats modifications. In rare situations, a lower difficulty AI can even beat one of higher difficulty due to their different play styles.
The highest difficulty AI manages to place itself at roughly 1700 Elo on the competitive ladders, beating out the majority of human players.
Cons
Con Big game performance
16v16, big coop/chicken defense games and some special "fun" maps can lead to the game becoming rather sluggish. The game only uses a single core, so especially mobile CPUs with low clock speed will have trouble playing the big games.
On the other hand, smaller games with maybe up to 200 units in play will run on pretty much any old machine thanks to the low minimum requirements.
Con Bad visual design
Obviously this is an open soruce project so nobody expects AAA level gfx but this one looks exceptionaly bad. Some of the weapon effects are hideous to look at. Simple things like UI buttons and color scheme seem to be visually out of sync with the way unit models and the map terrrain look.
It seems like a mishmash of visual styles which is probably a result of many different contributors of varreying skill levels.
There definately are visually consistent and pelasant ot look at open source games so The visual design of the game needs to have some sort of strcut guidline or rely primarily on the taste of a single individual from the ZK team.
Con Flat balance
The economy is very close to a Total Annihilation economy (despite all the changes they introduced) but the unit balance resembles games with harder unit counters like Warcraft and Starcraft. In Blizard games, there are different ways to limit what unit type or kind you can build at any stage of the game, like tech structures which the opponnet can scout.
In Zero - K this is not the case since there are no tech buildigns focusing the player on a certain unit type which can be scouted. You can make all units at all times. The gameplay design feels amateur and not thought through From the broadest perspective. It also manages to miss the advantages of the Spring engine and mixes the need to micromanage units that counter each other with big Area of Effect Weapons.