Silica is a promising attempt at fusing RTS and FPS, but needs meat to its bones
The idea of jumping into the armor of a Marine fighting Zerglings in StarCraft for a little while has always been alluring. In the same way it would be nice to get a bit more involved in the planning of attacks, because you know that sooner or later your commanders will get stuff wrong in most first-person shooters, leaving you to suffer the consequences on the ground. There have been some brave video games exploring this concept in the past – a fusion between RTS and FPS. It’s an exciting, yet daunting prospect.
Command & Conquer: Renegade, launched in 2002, had some RTS elements in its Command and Conquer Mode in multiplayer. Natural Selection, also released that year, had a full-blown commander mode, and got a sequel in 2012. However, the scale of Natural Selection is a small one – more fitting for a FPS game. You fight inside a building or a building complex, which is a very small space from a RTS perspective.
Silica was one man’s passion project for a long time and started out as a mod for Emperor: Battle for Dune (sometimes called Dune 3) until it was picked up by Bohemia Incubator, an indie program launched by Bohemia Interactive in 2020. The RTS roots are very apparent, as is the inspiration from titles like StarCraft and Dune 2. The developer wants to stay true to each genre and the grand scale of Silica, which has some enormous maps, is a great starting point for that.
Two human factions, which are pretty similar at the moment, and aliens are fighting a three-way war over a desert planet. Humans send out giant harvesters to mine crystals in the desert, while aliens collect the biological strains of critters living in the dunes. The goal is the same as in any RTS game: build up your base and destroy your opponents. There is a rudimentary tech tree at the moment and the unit diversity is already quite nice, from different infantry types to light and heavy vehicles and giant behemoths like the Siege Tank.
Silica's RTS view will be familiar to any genre veteran.
Bohemia Incubator
Games like Natural Selection 2 put a lot of pressure on the player in the commander role – the one playing the RTS side of things. It’s an important job, of course. Building units and vehicles makes them available to the FPS players. The RTS player also has the best overview of what’s going on in the map, though the classic Fog of War is obstructing their vision and needs to be cleared by troops. Communication is key here to get everyone on the same page. FPS players will get pings and waypoints whenever the RTS player orders them to go somewhere, a system that works quite well – it’s like a goalpost that keeps moving around like in a campaign.
To ease the potential pressure on the RTS player, Silica has integrated AI players that can take over the commander role, so people can jump in and out whenever they feel like it. All the usual hallmarks of an RTS are there – as a veteran of the genre, you’ll know what to do immediately.
Alien bases look pretty different from their human counterparts.
Bohemia Incubator
The shooter-side of things hasn’t been neglected: there is a realistic physics system controlling ballistics and vehicle movement, which makes combat engaging and driving some of the lighter vehicles quite tricky. FPS players benefit from the unit diversity as well, as they get additional loadouts and vehicles to choose from once the RTS player has produced them. The aliens work in an entirely different (and very interesting) way, but there is a similar division of jobs between the commander and the rest of the team.
The asymmetry between humans and aliens lends itself to great gameplay from both angles: RTS players need to keep the speed and maneuverability of aliens in mind, as they can easily start counters against your base or ambush your troops from clifftops. On the FPS side, many of the aliens are melee creatures, so they’ll have to find ways to close the distance between themselves and the ranged enemy troops. You’ll find yourself screaming “revenge for Buenos Aires” and “the only dead bug is a good bug” on the human side once you see aliens charging at you – it has those classic Starship Troopers vibes for sure.
Ever wanted to fight a Zerg rush in person?
Bohemia Incubator
When members of the press had a chance to play with the developers recently, I had great fun jumping into the commander seat of one of the human factions, because all those StarCraft skills easily transferred over – deciding between teching and unit production, scouting, when and where to make a push. My old TvT skills came in handy when we besieged the other humans’ base with artillery and beat them into submission – unfortunately my TvZ wasn’t quite up to par and the aliens managed to make a successful run-by in the meantime, destroying our research facility. While we had reached the highest tech tier, the destruction of the facility disabled the production of high tier units. Since the structure could not be rebuilt we had to spam cheap units and eventually managed to destroy the aliens’ primary base, but – led by the lead developer – they had wisely set up another one at a different location, so we had to ‘gg’ out.
Silica is very engaging already, to say the least. However, it’s also quite barebones at the moment – there are lots of features that still need to be implemented and when I asked for them, the response was always that it would come in early access. With a planned early access duration of one year, the developer has a strict and ambitious schedule considering that even basic things like rally points aren’t yet available.
Silica already offers some very cool vehicles and aliens to control.
Bohemia Incubator
Another potential point of frustration is the map size. While I love the scale of Silica much more than that of titles like Natural Selection 2, it took ages to traverse the desert on foot and even in the quick light vehicles. That means that both RTS and FPS players have periods where they simply can’t do a whole lot. Measures like transport vehicles and air units to speed things up are planned to be introduced at some point, we were told, but for now you’d best be prepared for a whole lot of walking as you scout for aliens and resources.
Silica is an exciting project and perhaps the best attempt yet at fusing two very different genres together into a shared experience – if you want to take part in that process from the beginning and shape its development, Silica is available now in early access on Steam. For anyone wanting more of a full experience right from the start, I’d recommend to be patient and keep a close eye on how things go.
