The approach to gameplay is significantly different to what you might expect. You begin the game with a ready-created base. From here you travel between bases and mission areas, always returning to this fundamental base for money transfers to your evacuation fleet construction. The link between them is your transportation facility. From here onward, objectives are given for each mission, which are completed in typical RTS fashion, employing skill to overwhelm your opponent or to complete the tasks quickly. Getting up close and personal with the units you send into battle is a new twist for the genre. Unit design is a relatively new concept that has been refined to the point where it plays a major role in the game's enjoyment. Allowing you to select a unit chassis and add the weapon, defence or aesthetic features of your choice makes for great fun and proper planning. The ingenuity doesn't end there -- Earth 2150 also has an extraordinary amount of keyboard and mouse based commands which can be configured to the player's desire. Finding a groove for your style of play can mean a promotion from rookie to veteran.
Earth 2150 is the most graphically stunning 3-D RTS we have seen in a long time, and this can be largely attributed to its attention to detail. Every aspect of the buildings, units and terrain has been detailed. You can mount your units or buildings with different guns and see the actual changes made. Volumetric fog is another well-used feature, and provides the basis for the common RTS shroud which engulfs the map. It has also been used for environmental effects which change with the weather conditions. Needless to say, the weather effects are the best a game can offer. The weather effects range from clear skies to snow, rain, lightning and meteor showers. Each influences how some units and structures perform, making for truly dynamic play. Clear skies, for example, allow the most productivity to come from your solar power plants, if you belong to the Lunar Corporation. The day and night cycle is another nice effect, which rapidly changes the visibility and tone of the game. At night it can be wise to have your units switch off their headlights to make a more stealthy and unsuspected attack on your opponent.
Earth 2150's dynamic and stirring music is a wonderful touch. In the early hours of the morning you feel tense from the eerie music. The music will then suddenly change to fit the action of a head-to-head battle, dying away when the action subsides. The sound effects are equally stunning, but some faults can be noticed. While the sounds themselves are timely and show a lot of quality, their integration into the game has been neglected. Battles can go unnoticed due to volume issues related to the unit and explosion sound effects. For a large portion of the game you spend your time viewing your base at a distance, but it is necessary to zoom right in to get the most action-packed sound. Compounding this, some of the unit voices quickly become tedious.
Unlike other games bundled with a map editor, Earth 2150's is one you're bound to use. The sheer beauty of its interface is what comes to mind first. You might imagine the topographical features of a 3D map to be difficult to create, but with Earth 2150's editor it is achievable with laughable ease. A two-mode painting method has been implemented, allowing you to simply raise or lower the height of the terrain as you please. You change the amount of ground you cover in each sweep with a simple change of the brush size, the texture with another click, and the aesthetic features with a couple more. Whether creating a map for you and your friends to play on, or customising a single-player challenge, making a map has never been so much fun. For the lazy mapmakers out there, a random map generator has even been included.
As expected of most games today, multiplayer is an integral part of the game. But having said that, Earth 2150 adds far more than usual. Not only is there the option of playing in different modes like skirmish (single-player), LAN, and Internet, but there are also six different game types available: money gathering races, structure destruction, unit-only battles, hide-'n'-seek, money-less battles and regular deathmatch battles. The game also supports up to eight-player Internet play.
Earth 2150 is a superb example of everything a 3-D RTS should be. It can quite rightly claim the position of pioneer, in the inevitable migration of the RTS genre to true 3-D .
