Earth 2160

It's a game that has some extremely genius design buried under terrible quality of life and general gameplay issues. Apart from the obnoxious registration upon first startup, there is a lot of good and a lot of bad here. I've never seen faction design this inspired, especially in terms of base building/space management. Vehicles are modular, based on what faction you play you might need different armor or weapons, and it's all just really interesting to play. Factions are radically different in terms of focus, you get tanks and vehicles, futuristic hovercraft, biological nightmares or hordes or battle mechs. - The Eurasian Dynasty builds large, interconnected complexes that all have to be connected via tubes - The Lunar Corp can call down buildings from orbit anywhere on the map, but only ever 5 buildings can be queued at the same time, their man buildings are stackable from several modules - The UCS builds large energy networks across the map, and is based on decentralization and modularity - Aliens don't have any buildings except defense, they literally just clone or mutate from the same basic alien, literally no game up to this day has done anything more innovative in terms of faction design Each faction gets a campaign, and missions are interestingly challenging, but do not vary much. The story and dialogue are sub-par through and through, and the biggest issue of this game is the terrible unit AI and pathfinding. The maps are generally small and units do not retain formation or cohesion, greatly detracting from the gameplay. With some more polish this game could have easily been a gem, because it did bring the genre forward, but nobody noticed it because its innovations and ingenuity were buried under a layer of terrible UX.