Real Time Strategy game with fully functional time travel?!

Well, there is a game that has recently come out that I think the good folks here at Slender Nation may be interested in! This is for all you RTS fans.

It's called Achron!
http://www.achrongame.com/site/

You will have to bear with me, because the gameplay doesn't translate well into speech or text. It's easy enough to get the hang of when actually playing the game though.

Achron is an indie title set in the far flung future, featuring the classic three race set up. Humans, and two alien races who aren't really allies either. In this respect it is much like Starcraft, however that is about where the similarities end.

Achron's main attraction is it's incredibly innovative inclusion of time travel. Not as a story element, but as a gameplay mechanic. As the player you can travel back in time and issue new orders to your units, as well as cancelling old ones. This allows you to change past gameplay radically.

Let's say that one of your secondary bases gets attack by your opponent in the present and is destroyed. You can go back to a minute ago and reorganize your army so that your secondary base is better defended, this time successfully fending off the attack and destroying the attacking army.

The changes you make to the timeline(which is shown in the UI near the bottom of the screen) are propogated forward with something called time waves. Time waves move from the past, upward through time, bringing with them any changes that may have been made. So, using the above example, the changes made by saving your base may be brought forward into the present on a green time wave. Your opponent won't see the exact nature of the changes you've made until the time wave catches up to his current position on the timeline.

Too complicated? Well, then just forget the explaination and trust me when I say that the time travel mechanic works perfectly, allowing for exactly the sorts of situations that you would expect from time travel.

The most awesome part? The time travel mechanic works the same within single player as well as multiplayer. The game engine is capable of supporting up to 15 human players fighting across a timeline of two weeks. However, the most people you'll probably see in a multiplayer game is four, and the timeline only stretches 8 minutes. 7 minutes into the past and 1 into the future.

How much you can time travel is limited by how much chronoenergy you have. The cost of chronoenergy is based on how far back on the timeline you are giving your orders, and how many individual units you are giving orders to.

Here are some other resources as well as some reviews of the game to peruse if you are interested. I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about how the time travel works that I have not managed to answer, but I don't really think I could have ever hoped to answer all of them. If what I have said intrigues you, or just confuses you, please read some of these reviews and information sources who probably do a better job of explaining it then I do.

If you like time travel, RTS's, or just innovation in games, it's worth your time to at least understand.

http://www.youtube.com/user/HazardousSoftware - This is company's youtube channel, featuring some explanation videos as well as the launch trailer.

http://www.rtsguru.com/game/389/features/192/Achron-Review.html - RTSguru's review.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/05/23/preinforcements-achron-is-coming/ - Rock, Paper, Shotgun discussing Achron.

http://www.gamersdailynews.com/article-3013-Achron-Review-PC.html - Gamers Daily News reviewing Achron.

http://www.achrongame.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page - Achron's Wiki.


Just thought the people here might be interested to know about it. Though it is bordering a personal plug because my brother was involved with making the game.

Hope you like it!

As a final note, I highly suggest that if you purchase it, you buy the game directly from the official website. It is available on Steam, but the company gets more money if you buy it from them. Also, Steam, being in charge of regional pricing, have overpriced it for Europe, probably on purpose. It's supposed to go for $30, but they're selling it for 30 Euros, which is completely different and an entirely unreasonable a price.

Wait, Achron's out now?

I haven't heard anything from this since the early development phase. Excellent, and when I have cash I will be looking into this.