Still Game? is an occasional series in which I replay a game from my youth, to see if it really is as good as I remembered. This week: Total Annihilation on PC.
Before Planetary Annihilation, before Supreme Commander, there was Total Annihilation. A late nineties RTS featuring huge maps, huge weapons, destructible scenery and robots. Lots and lots of robots.
I gave my copy to my friend Alan, because all I ever did was play skirmish, which ate all my spare time and brought my little Pentium to its knees. But GoG just gave it away for free! So let's give it a go and see if it's still any good.
Back in the day
TA stood out from the crop of post Command and Conquer wannabes for several reasons. Firstly, it had a 3D engine, with each unit, building and stray missile rendered in chunky textured polygons. The shape of the scenery affected the battle, meaning that targets could shelter behind terrain or the wrecked remains of other units. The world would change as you progressed; resources would be consumed, weapons would scar the ground, debris would litter the landscape. Even forests could burn, fire passing from tree to tree.
There were robots, vehicles, boats, planes, submarines and hovercraft. Some special units, like the Commander, could walk on land and underwater. Orders could be queued endlessly, allowing you to concentrate on other aspects of the game while your construction units toiled away in the background. It was a vast and detailed game.
If that wasn't enough, TA also allowed people to make their own maps and units, and before long my already burdened PC was groaning under the weight of all the extra things I'd downloaded. I remember having to install a utility just to manage them all.
If TA had a failing it was that it couldn't cope with its own ambition. Resource management was a constant struggle, limiting not only how quickly you could build but also how much some weapons could fire. Units were varied and numerous but controlling them at scale felt clumsy, and keeping track of everything without being able to zoom in and out quickly became a chore.
It was possible to construct vast armies but their limited pathfinding behaviour often left them piling up in tight spaces or blocking the exits to their own factories. Battles could last for hours, as you often had to find and annihilate every last enemy on the map. Despite the complexity, the only strategy seemed to be to build as much as you could as quickly as possible.
Of course, much of what I've just described could be seen as positive. So let's give it another go and find out.
Back in this day
TA's single player campaign has never appealed to me. I gave it a go, back when I first had the game, but I found it was much more entertaining playing skirmish against the computer, so that's what I started with this time.
The first thing that struck me when I started playing again was how low the resolution was. This is because the game options aren't in the initial menu, so I missed them the first time around and was stuck at a feeble 640x480. I tried setting the resolution to something higher and re-loading my save, but it crashed, so I started from the beginning again.
Remember when games didn't scale aspects of their UI according to the chosen resolution? It happened for a while until monitor companies started making screens with more pixels than anyone had imagined. TA is one of those games - impressively, it supports my modern PC's native resolution, but taking advantage of it reduces the game's menu bar from something like a quarter of the width of the screen to a size so small I thought for a moment it had disappeared entirely.
You might not think that's a problem, but there are a lot of buttons in that menu and both reading and clicking on them accurately becomes much harder at a high resolution. Accessibility matters.
Get to the point man
But I digress. Total Annihilation! It's all about the massive armies and the battles and the explosions and I was keen to get to it. Before long I was constructing my army at pace, experimenting with the different unit types and climbing the technology tree.
The sound is particularly good - the crash of cannon fire, the roar of engines, the whirr and clank of robots, all underpinned by the surprisingly dramatic score. Armies spit all manner of different weaponry at each other: missiles, mortars, lasers, plasma, rockets, shells - each with their own power and accuracy. It's dramatic stuff.
Unfortunately, before you can get to any of that you have to build some units. Which requires building some buildings to make those units. Which requires building some resource buildings to collect resources to build those buildings. And if you can't get enough resources you can build more buildings in order to build upgraded versions of your resource buildings. I'm enjoying this overuse of the word 'building', in case you hadn't guessed.
A lot of the time playing TA is waiting for things to finish being built. Even the basic units take a long time. When you get to the top end of the technology tree (where it gets more interesting) you might be waiting twenty minutes or more for something to be ready. You can speed this up by using more than one construction unit at a time, but all of this adds to the drain on your resources.
Or so I thought. Turns out TA has an option to increase the game speed. Again, this is somewhat obliquely under Settings, Interface, 'Game'. Not 'Game speed', 'Game'. It's not exactly obvious. Once I'd got the speed to something reasonable TA started taking up way less of my time. I wonder if I knew about this option when I first owned it?
Some meagre conclusions
I'll admit it, I still enjoy a good skirmish. There's a satisfaction to be had from building the most unstoppable army and utterly annihilating the enemy. I particularly enjoy TA's most overpowered unit, the mighty Krogoth. I once built three of them, which is more than enough to take down any enemy. So yes, there are highlights, and TA will always bring back fond memories. It's just there's so many small negatives that mean it will always fall short of being a classic.
The pathfinding is still pretty bad. Not only do large groups of units sometimes get stuck trying to maneuver through narrow gaps (a problem exacerbated in a battle situation, where the remains of destroyed units cause further impairment), even simple routes can flummox units. At one point I wanted my Commander to move to the other side of a row of tanks, but instead it walked straight up to the tanks and got stuck.
There are other small signs that TA is past its prime. The keyboard shortcuts feel unnecessarily complicated. Playing at a higher resolution is good, but everything gets smaller so differentiating between units is harder. There's no zoom. There seems to be no command for 'select next idle construction unit'. Building a weapon tower gives no indication of the range of that tower, even when complete. None of this ruins the game, but it does feel a little dated.
The main problem is the lack of strategy. There's a huge variety of terrain and units and weapons but beating the enemy can be done pretty much the same way every time. I advance up the technology tree as fast as possible then build a load of the best units while my long range weapons slowly pummel the enemy at a distance. It's good, but it gets repetitive after a while.
I've still not tried the single player. The thought of playing with only a stump of the technology tree still doesn't appeal. There's some story in there somewhere, but ultimately it's about beating the other player.
I think I remember now why I gave my copy to Alan. It was a good game, but I don't really want to play it anymore.