‘The Hive’, a story driven fantasy game that plays like an RTS leaves Early Access, some thoughts

I was really excited when I remembered The Hive, and now it’s out of Early Access I have given it some final thoughts.

My first attempt at loading the game with the final version failed. I started a new game on “Hard” difficulty and it just sat at a loading screen and never loaded. I had to forcibly kill the game and try again.

The developers claim that it’s a “story driven fantasy game”, but honestly it plays out like a rather basic real time strategy game that has a few objectives to do on each level. You have a very limited selection of buildings and units for example, all of the units play very simple roles too. There’s no real room for experimentation in your play style here. The way the game plays is so linear and restricting it's just not interesting.

First confusing thing: the introduction video is very weird in comparison to how the game actually plays. It’s all about humans leaving the earth, and then you’re dropped into playing as some bugs. I would have liked for them to match up the intro to the start of the game a little more. The introduction is exciting, then you play the first level and you’re sorta like—what the heck is going on, am I playing a different game?

It tries to emulate Starcraft in the way it works, right down to controlling what is essentially the Zerg complete with a build-able Queen unit, it’s obviously inspired heavily by it, but it comes across as a cheap imitation of aspect of it.


Visually it actually looks quite nice but the rest of it falls pretty flat. Graphics don’t make a game and for The Hive that saying has never been truer. The style of the game is often so dark you can't really see much at all.

For a strategy game you would expect there to be some, you know, strategy to it. The only thing you need to do in this game is build as many units as you can and that’s basically it. You can do a few upgrades to increase attack power, but nothing really all that interesting.

You don’t even get notified when units are built and ready, that’s how little the developers have focused on the small details to actually make it less of a hassle to play through. You don’t get notified when a worker harvesting food runs out and little annoyances like that are just plastered throughout the game.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the game, is that it only saves after each level. For an RTS game where levels can take a while, I find it a really stupid idea not to allow people to save mid-game.


The developers are completely against having saved games mid-mission:

QuoteSaving should not be core gameplay mechanic like in XCOM

Source
Even though some missions can take the better part of an hour. If you find a bug, or you have to do something else it’s tough bloody luck pal. I’ve seen plenty of people complain about this, but the developers simply will not budge on it. There's sticking to your plan, and there's just giving the finger to what your players constantly request.

You have an adviser who feeds you small bits of information. The problem is that they are far too quiet, something I reported to the developers in June and it's still not fixed. It also doesn’t help that the adviser's text often overlaps the bottom panel making it difficult to read.

Continuing on about sound effects, it’s not just the adviser that bugs me. The game has literally no music, it’s mostly the same ambient sound looped over forever which was incredibly boring and gave the game zero atmosphere.

I remember the end of Mission 1 where you have to kill some ancient creature, it seems to be able to make rocks come crashing down around it, which has no sound effects at all to it. So not only does the gameplay have no attention to details, the sound design is also lacking in many places.

Missions only take as long as they do due to you being given such a scarce amount of resources and the time it takes to collect them, it becomes steadily more boring due to the watch and wait game it becomes.

Sometimes for no apparent reason, your units will deselect themselves. It looks like it’s an issue from where the game previously takes control of the camera to show you something, but it does it repeatedly any time you enter those sections.

I was thoroughly disappointed with The Hive and I do not recommend purchasing it. The whole game is very unpolished and annoying to play. It's slow as hell, the missions are uninspired and boring, the game is just not worth putting time into. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.