Meridian: New World Impressions

"A Cinematic and Beautiful RTS"

For me the real time strategy area has always been dedicated to the playing of Command and Conquer or Age of the Empires. They both follow a very specific path and it seems that Meridian has went out to mix that up with a more cinematic and engaging RTS style of gameplay. A mixture of cinematics, really beautiful scenery and units mixed with some extra movement between these parts. There is a definite aim at creating a little more story then just providing us with a series of objectives to build towards. It goes as far as offering a nice hub area to move about between missions for extra information and tactics before you go onto the field. Even the levels are neat as they mix in cinematics and bridge areas into a larger campaign. Having played a fair bit of the campaign levels I am definitely intrigued with the chosen direction having a mix of seek objectives or even the odd sneak around. It's things like this that change what you would expect from this type of game and it's very nice. What's really a standout for me above all else is the detail of the worlds which look stunning and the character models themselves look very sharp. They all fit quite well into this world and move around in what I would imagine is a realistic matter. So all in all I really like the campaign portions I have played thus far, but campaign isn't the only important aspect of RTS. For me I find true value in the extra skirmishes I can play after or even before touching the campaign. This is where I find some work needs to be done as it doesn't feel very balanced. Mixing between difficulties I found the flux of quick unit attacks to be very overwhelming. Now I get that it's intended to be a fast paced strategy title, it would just be nice to have a few minutes to setup an area. It just seems very guns blazing by the AI and every single other enemy team feels that my home base is the best area to engage in wars. Sure they are attacking each other, but it all seems to be around my area as waves of various colors attack. This definitely needs work as skirmishes add hours of gameplay to an RTS, the maps for this mode are fairly good though so I suppose just more would be nice. There's mention of a map editor so that should actually help a lot as long as users are creating. It's really interesting to see this type of title being in early access, but will give it time to change through development. There's also talk Meridian: New World will unlock April 4 and you can check the Early Access Steam Page from below. Will also mention that it's damn impressive that this was made by one developer!