Earth vs Mars is a brand new RTS in improvement at Relic, however in contrast to the studio’s massive Firm of Heroes and Daybreak of Warfare video games, this one is a “smaller indie-style” sport being made underneath its Relic Labs label, which goals to “discover new sub-genres, experiment, get our artistic juices going, and launch video games extra ceaselessly.”
The brand new sport is a campy tackle a well-recognized situation: The Martians, having had sufficient of our nonsense, invade Earth with an awesome pressure of alien craft, hover-tanks, and different such staples of basic sci-fi. Humanity’s solely hope is the “Splice-O-Tron,” a know-how that permits humanity’s leaders to mix “volunteers” with terrestrial animals to create supersoldiers that can battle alongside typical army forces. However it will not be simply human-animal hybrids on the desk: The Steam web page cites intriguing items just like the airborne “cheetah-fly” and the “lethal squirrel-cow infantry.” I am not likely an RTS man, however I positively need to know extra about that.
However Mars, not being slouches within the know-how division, will deploy their very own weirdo mutants because the marketing campaign progresses, evolving their very own military alongside yours. Earth vs Mars will function a singleplayer marketing campaign with greater than 30 missions, together with on-line multiplayer, a versus mode, and a map editor enabling gamers to create their very own customized maps and situations.
The Earth vs Mars reveal comes only a week after Relic introduced a brand new “daring course for the longer term,” constructed on three key pillars: Continued assist and updates for its present video games; “re-imaging” its older video games within the type of re-releases, remasters, or “brand-new franchise experiences that seize the spirit of the originals whereas interesting to a brand new era of gamers”; and “smaller scope” video games with an indie bent, which Relic stated “will enable the studio to discover new genres and gameplay experiences and proceed fostering a tradition of experimentation and inventive expression.”
That announcement got here within the wake of a tough couple of years for Relic, which has laid off greater than 150 staff since mid-2023 and in March 2024 was offered by earlier proprietor Sega. Relic stated in Might of that 12 months that it was “returning to its roots as an impartial artistic studio,” nevertheless it additionally confirmed that its new majority proprietor was funding agency Emona Capital LLC, which struck me as a bit counter-intuitive to the idea of independence.
In any occasion, Earth vs Mars is clearly Relic’s first massive step ahead because it seems to be to regain its footing, and whereas it is nonetheless an RTS—the style the studio is understood for—it does look to be a less complicated, extra scaled-back expertise than Relic’s earlier video games. A launch date hasn’t been introduced however Earth vs Mars is predicted to be out this summer time, and it’ll solely be accessible for PC at launch: Relic stated it could come to different platforms sooner or later, “based mostly on the sport’s reception.”
