| Maelstrom | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | KD Vision |
| Publisher(s) | Codemasters |
| Released | February 20 2007 |
| Genre | Real-time strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
| Platform(s) | PC |
Maelstrom is a real-time strategy game developed by KD-Vision in Russia and published by Codemasters. It has a post-apocalyptic setting with three factions and a script by Sci-Fi author James Swallow. The plot involves a war between two human factions fighting for survival in the wake of a meteor impact, ecological disaster, and nuclear holocaust, the two factions fighting over the last remaining drinkable water. One is The Remnants, former U.S. military that rely on stealth, modding units, and hacking, the other being the Ascension, a corporation that controls shielded Mechmorph war machines. Into this enters an alien race called the Hai-Genti, aliens bent on taking over the planet, this race pollutes the water supply and cannibalize their units to make killing machines. The game utilises a lot of the technology used in KD's previous RTS game, Perimeter. Features such as terraforming and weather control are so far unique in the genre, and are said to be core to the gameplay. In Maelstrom, you can also control the hero units directly, in third person perspective.
Factions
The Remnants In the Maelstrom Universe, The Remnants are a guerilla fighting organisation who are waging a campaign against the Ascension. They are mostly recruited form the remains of the armed or security services. They were founded by James Buchanan, a former US Navy Officer. They can be characterized as a make-do-and-mend outfit. They use low-tech and improvised weaponry and vehicles to wage an asymmetric campaign against the Ascension. The Ascension The Ascension are the High-tech faction in the game. They are the last remaining corporation, with exclusive access to high technology units. They are led by Arlan Khan, who sees himself as mankind's saviour but pursues this in a totalitarian way. The main thing that identifies the Ascension is high-tech dual-use units that transform to do two things. Screenshots on the Codemasters website show at least one of these units that is both a bipedal walker and a hovering gunship. The Hai-Genti The Hai-Genti are aliens who come to Earth into the middle of the struggle between the Ascension and Remnants. They use no mechanical units, and are a race of bio-constructs, each engineered for a specific purpose. They thrive in water, and this gives rise to their tactic of flooding the environments in the game to gain an advantage. They are fleeing a dying planet, and are led on Earth by Mammon. They have no desire to cleanse Earth of human life but rather to terraform it in order to claim it as their new homeworld. In this respect, they are not evil, just oblivious.
