Recent reviews by Zarius

Work hard for money in game, until you can get blueberries, then just become a blueberry factory and become easy millionaire. Also fedoras are cool.

This game... This is a game I like to remember as being one of the best RTS games ever. Being released in the late 90s it came out amongst other great RTS games like, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Red Alert, Command and Conquer and Age of Empires. Back then the RTS competition was a tough one to beat and Total Annihilation proved it could be on top with the rest of them. Its gameplay is smooth, it works and its easy to learn.
The resources in this game are Energy and Metal, and the resource gathering is different but works in the case of Income and Loss. Your income will be determined by things such as how many solar collectors you have for energy, and how many metal deposits you are collecting from. You always want to aim for your income to higher than your loss at all times even when you're building, this way you can almost avoid any loss in resources all together. The best way to explain this is like this; Max Metal and Energy at the start is 1000 in stores, A barracks could cost 500 metal and 2350 energy, the game will decide how much you will lose per second that its being built, so youre income of metal might be 5.4, and energy is 111 you're loss might then be 6.2 and 120 so you will start to lose these resources over time and could run out of energy before its finished you avoid this by building more energy collectors to make the income of energy much higher and then not run out of energy in the middle of building.
Most of the gameplay exists around your one main builder unit, The Commander, this guy builds all your buildings and gathers temporary resources (of which btw is pretty much everything, you can gather trees and folliage for energy. Rocks and whats left of units are gathered as metal.). That being said however, once your base is built up and your income of resources is good, is where you start to build your massive robotic army of your infantry, vehicles and aircraft. There is no population cap so you build as much as you like. Through reading everything that is said about the units and buildings you'll be able to find a good mix of what you need nice and easy.
Pros: -Quick Gameplay
- Gameplay makes sense and works
- Robot Armies
- A different type of resource collecting not seen often
- A long story driven campaign
- Pretty much everything explodes
Cons: - its from the 90s so graphics will be out dated
- Resources might get annoying to keep at a steady rate