GreyGoo is the superb new real-time strategy (RTS) from Petroglyph who were once better known as Westwood Studios. As you’d expect from these developers, GreyGoo is an RTS in the style of Command and Conquer (C&C) and in one sense I could finish this review right here, but would be churlish of me… so lets forge ahead.
The graphics in this game are awesome – old school styling but with a beautiful sci-fi/steam-punk feel and all rendered in glorious HD – enough to make your mouth water. The sound and music is pretty slick too – although I must admit the South African voice actors do occasionally lend a little accidental humour to the proceedings. All this comes with a warning though – frame-rates on GreyGoo are pretty poor – I personally played it on a GTX 970 4gb and my monitor was juddering like an epileptic raver at some points. Although there is a light at the end of the tunnel, Petroglyph are releasing patches to fix the video issues, so I won’t damn them quite yet.
The gameplay is pretty slick too – as you’d expect from the one-time Westwood boys, but they’ve also introduced a nice base-building mechanic, which really helps to differentiate the factions. The Goo faction is particularly interesting with its unit-style bases being free to roam the map – though for me this needed more balancing; I was literally chasing down the last elusive Goo units for over an hour after I’d wiped out their main force – it was harder than photographing Bigfoot in a blizzard.
At the end of the day, this is a solid RTS with glorious presentation and some great new elements which make it stand out from the crowd. But I can’t help but be reminded of the base building in Earth 2016 so it’s not as unique as you may think. Am I glad I spent my money on this game? Yes I am, it might not be as earth shattering as hoped, but its still great fun and Petroglyph are working on the smaller issues as we speak.