Grey Goo Campaign Review

I wasn't a fan, but at least they tried something unique

Over the years, many folks in my audience have recommended Grey Goo, a science-fiction real-time strategy game released in 2015 by Petroglyph Games. I took off the last week of January to recharge from work, and that felt like a great opportunity to pick up this game and play through its campaign.

Searching For A Killer App

Over the years, usually when evaluating the trade-offs of a particular mechanic, I would reliably receive comments like: “Well, Grey Goo had this mechanic X that did Y. Did you think about that?” And in booting up Grey Goo, I was curious to understand why this particular class of comment had come up so many times.

I quickly discovered that Grey Goo has a lot of mechanics. Like, a lot. It’s almost as though the designers didn’t have the word “no” in their vocabulary, and just implemented every idea they could think of.

Hiding units in brush? Check. Stealth and detection? Check. Ammo for air units? Check. High ground and low ground? Check. Terrain that’s impassable, except by certain units? Check. Epic units? Check. Pay-as-you-go economy? Check. Not actually a pay-as-you-go economy? Check. Workers, but not really? Check. RPS? Check. Global macro bar? Check. Still needing to manually fidde with production structures, such as for setting waypoints, despite having a global macro bar? Also check.

There’s a lot going on in Grey Goo!

The problem I ran into is that none of these systems really stood out to me as Grey Goo’s “killer app”, the core mechanic(s) that enable the game to stand out. Everything is just sort of serviceable; it works, it does its job, but it doesn’t really get me excited.

I don’t play games because they fail to sufficiently annoy me; I play them because there’s something I find enjoyable!

The lack of an appealing mechanic is an issue because it forces me to pay attention to the smaller flaws omnipresent throughout the title. A good example is the global macro bar; it feels like there’s a UI bug in which you select your army, then go off to build something (say, Conduit), and then discover that laying down the structure caused your selected units to move, too, since the global bar doesn’t necessarily change unit selection. I understand this is a subtle and nuanced interface challenge - mixing global buttons with locally controllable units, all in the same window - but because it’s not done particularly well, it sticks out as a sore spot.

Unit readability is another good example. Take a look at the below screenshot; to my (novice) eyes, it just looks like a big, not very identifiable blob.

I could go on; clickboxes don’t seem very accurate; there’s finickiness about attack move and attack targeting; placement of extractors to find the optimal spot is tedious; pathing is sometimes very strange; and so on. None of these are game-breaking problems, and honestly I wonder if I would have even noticed them if there were something about the gameplay that really attracted me. But there wasn’t.

Grey Goo just plays bland. I feel that the developers focused more on producing a large quantity of features instead of depth and quality in a smaller number, producing a kind of “meh” result that gives me a case of the shrugs.

Who are these people?

I thought it was pretty cool that Grey Goo assembled high-quality cutscenes and animations to tell its story; the production quality is a lot higher than I expected from an indie RTS. Unfortunately, I feel that the decision to adopt a realistic art style causes the game to age pretty badly. Grey Goo doesn’t play like it’s eight years old, but it looks ancient when watching the interstitials between missions.

The larger issue I have with Grey Goo’s storytelling is that it fails to pull me into the world. There’s a similar problem to the gameplay of too much content without enough detail - within the first five or ten minutes, the game is throwing out words like Keyhole, Aperture, Keep, Catalyst, Saruk, Baz Barker. I ended up tuning a lot of this out because I didn’t have any context on what it is or why it matters.

When I think about successful narrative stories in real-time strategy, they make me root for the protagonist: whether it’s Raynor’s Raiders fighting against the Dominion, or Rig’s Saga to conquer the land of Northgard, I want the main characters to succeed. Each game’s campaign takes its time patiently building up the storyline, pulling me into the world, and allowing me to invest into the fortunes of the characters.

I never feel this way about Grey Goo’s Saruk or Singleton; I’m never a given a chance to understand their motivations or care about their fate. At times I feel like this is such a classic indie game mistake - the freedom to create whatever you’d like spilling over into self-indulgence - wherein the story and lore are deemed to be so inherently interesting that the game absolves itself of actually convincing anyone of that fact.

I’m appreciative of Petroglyph’s world-building; this game goes way beyond the basics of “an RTS about the gray goo scenario”. But the lack of effort to pull the player in causes the plot to fall flat; it’s like kicking off Halo after you’ve encountered the Flood, or starting Warcraft III after The Culling. I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting story content here, but I just don’t care about any of it.

Build-a-base-itis

I first read the term “build-a-base-itis” in a review of Warcraft III, and it’s a good encapsulation of what can go wrong in RTS campaigns. Too many missions get bogged down in endless base building from scratch, failing to innovate the gameplay beyond that.

Grey Goo doesn’t suffer from build-a-base-itis, per se, partly because there’s just not that much base building to begin with. But I think it has the same philosophical problem, in that it seems to think that its campaign need not consist of much more than its actual gameplay. Most missions in Grey Goo bring little creativity to the table - you build a base, mass up a bunch of units, and destroy stuff.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some gems; Mission 13, for example, pairs Crescents with Radiants and is particularly memorable. But for the most part, the campaign is interchangeable slugfest after interchangeable slugfest. Even the maps feel too similar, even in the relatively more creative Goo campaign. By far the worst offender is the last mission, which throws an absurdly unfair number of units at the player not in order to actually defeat you, but merely to annoy the hell out of you as it repeatedly destroys a Mother Goo on an Aperture device and forces you to wait another five minutes for the agony to stop.

It’s boring. From my eyes, Grey Goo’s 15 base game campaigns consist of 2 tutorial missions (Beta and Human), 3 creative missions (defending three points with air units, Goo introduction, and Crescent/Radiant micro mission), and an astonishing 10 mass up units and clear the map missions.

There’s so many patterns the developers could have picked up off the workshop floor: adopt highly varied map layouts; use missions as an opportunity to introduce specific units or mechanics; leverage the gameplay to tell the story instead of interstitials; and so on. And it’s not like the developers have to use these sorts of formulaic ideas - they’re allowed to come up with unique concepts, too!

I have a hard time figuring out whether Grey Goo’s campaign falls flat because its developers ran out of time to create interesting missions, because they couldn’t think of any interesting missions, or if the gameplay mechanics are too superficial to support interesting missions. Whatever it was that happened, this is one of the least interesting real-time strategy campaigns I’ve ever played.

At Least It’s Not a Knock-off

The one nice thing I want to mention about Grey Goo is that it feels like a game with some heart and creativity behind it - it doesn’t feel like a knock-off of a larger title, the way so many indie RTS games do. I feel like this is a big part of why the title ended up making its mark on the genre and selling pretty decently. Heck, I reviewed the game in part because people kept telling me to play it. I think players respond to vision, and Grey Goo’s got plenty of it. Credit where credit is due.

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.