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 Home -> Reviews -> Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising By John "Award" Del Percio, July 5, 2001
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Developer :Rage Software
Publisher :Interplay
Release Date :Late June 2001
Demo Available : Yes - Download
Table of Contents

· Introduction
· Closer Look
· Facts
· Final

One RTS, Hold the Strategy, Please!

I'm not sure whether the developers truly intended the game to be a true strategy game, or if it was simply an oversight in the marketing end of the game production, but it really is mislabeled, though I'm not sure that any label really fits it accurately. The website and the box refer to the game as a "Real Time Strategy" game, though, clearly, after playing, it is not really and RTS. It has quite a few elements of RTS such as resource gathering, base defense, establishing ground, reconnaissance, and strategic planning as to your method of striking, but it really is unfair to call it an RTS, as that inspires visions of Command & Conquer, Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and Dune. I'd classify Antaeus as an action game, though it has too much RTS to really be called action. Still, though, I've never seen an RTS that only allowed a total of fifteen units at a time. It really turns it into a bit of a squad-based game such as Fallout: Tactics, though a bit more 3D and real-time.

Uhmm, yeah
Something's definitely wrong here
Dodging the ack ack
Find me something to shoot!

I spent nearly all of my time in the game piloting one of the various vehicles (as you can tell from the screen shots, the helicopters were my personal favorites to play.) The player AI is ok, bit isn't spectacular, so I wouldn't depend on your team mates to be able to conquer the situation on their own, though something tells me that was done intentionally, and I'm grateful for it. The vehicles themselves are quite fun to pilot. The hover-tanks, heavy tanks and helicopters were a rather nice "arcade" look at vehicular control, which is a nice change from all the flight simulators out there, though playing with the Pegasus lifting helicopter made me want to play a helicopter sim. Combat takes quite a bit of FPS skill in terms of target tracking, strafing to dodge projectiles, and, my personal favorite, fleeing for your life!

Where am I?
A base structure
Attacking!
Where is anything??

The only really disappointing aspect of the game was the lack of multi-player. I'm not really a huge fan of multi-player gaming (except for RPGs), but I do know how important it is to the longevity of a game, and, in all honesty, I think Antaeus would have been a pretty cool game to go head to head with. I'm not entirely sure how that would have been implemented, though, as aspects of the single player game don't really lend themselves well to the multi-player scene. I suspect that's why Rage (the company, not the GV editor) left it absent from the game, though.

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