The Scouring

Soothes my hankering for old school Warcraft. Wish there was more voice over lines for units instead of grunts but I get it. Fun game so far. Loving the different modes. Can be quite the challenge on hard but that's the way its suppose to be!

[h2]A promising RTS held back by frustrating AI, sluggish unit movement, and a lack of content[/h2] [i]Disclaimer: This review is based solely on playing against the AI in the singleplayer classic and challenge modes, [i]not[/i] the hero mode or multiplayer.[/i] ✅ [b][i]Sharp and pleasing visuals[/i][/b] This game does a great job of maintaining visual clarity in combat, with carefully designed and distinct unit silhouettes and colors. The environments are also quite nice to look at, with plenty of visual detail. ✅ [b][i]Good UI/UX[/i][/b] Unit HP is conveyed in a very clear and effective manner, which is a must for me in RTS games. The building and upgrade UI is also great, with everything presented clearly and simply. ✅ [b][i]Fun modifiers[/i][/b] There are some really fun modifiers that can completely change how you approach a game, and these have been one of the highlights for me. The most recent one I beat after multiple attempts essentially spawned increasingly stronger goblin waves at the start of each night cycle that would attack one of your bases. This made turtling around your expansions and main base a necessity, and it was fun having to balance defending against the waves with expanding and harassing the enemy AI. ⛔ [b][i]Awful AI behavior[/i][/b] The AI teammates are truly awful to play with. They'll sometimes send their units on suicide attacks against enemy bases, hemorrhaging valuable resources in the process. Even worse, they'll send workers to places where you're building an expansion and just plop their own town center down there. They sometimes do this even when they have closer expansion locations available. This makes playing with AI teammates incredibly frustrating, to the point where I eventually stopped playing with them altogether. There's also a less serious issue with the "goblin wave" modifier, where you can cheese the waves by having air units attack them. Since the goblins can't attack air units, they'll just run back and forth indefinitely. You can even kite them toward enemy bases and effectively grief the AI with multiple waves ⛔ [b][i]Sluggish unit movement and pathing[/i][/b] Something about the unit movement feels very off. I think it's due to the units having turn delay, which makes moving units, especially melee units, feel sluggish and unsatisfying. The pathing when gathering resources is also poor, with workers frequently getting stuck on gold veins and simply standing there doing nothing. This has a pretty significant impact on the overall gameplay, too. Poor movement and units frequently getting stuck on each other, even outside of chokepoints, heavily rewards turtling and defending over attacking. ⛔ [b][i]Lack of campaigns, factions, units, buildings, upgrades, etc.[/i][/b] In its current iteration, it's very obvious that [i]The Scouring[/i] is lacking content. Having no campaign is an immediate turnoff for a lot of RTS players, and having only two factions is especially limiting, as it severely restricts the amount of strategic diversity and variety between matches. There also simply aren't enough units, buildings, upgrades, or other systems to give the game much variety within those factions. That said, this is an Early Access game, so I don't necessarily expect it to have a massive amount of content yet. My concern is more about how much the game still needs to expand. I'd love to see more factions and substantially more units, buildings, and upgrades added over time. [h2]Grade: C[/h2] I think there's a solid foundation here, and the fact that this is Early Access definitely changes how I view some of these shortcomings. The visuals are sharp, the UI is well designed, and the modifiers can create some really interesting scenarios. There are enough good ideas here that I'm interested in seeing where the game goes. At the same time, there's still a [i]lot[/i] of content and refinement needed. The AI and unit movement need work, and having only two factions currently puts a pretty hard ceiling on the game's strategic variety. I'm not expecting the game to be fully fleshed out at this stage, but I'd like to see substantial expansion in these areas as development continues. It's a promising foundation for an RTS, and I'm interested to see how much the game can grow from here.