This Game Deserves More Attention!

When the average gamer hears about a game made in 1997 these days, he shrugs it off and moves on. With this game, that'd be a huge mistake.

Though it can be found for a few dollars now, Total Annihilation is an outstanding game, far ahead of its time. It has the best graphics of any Real-Time-Strategy game ever conceived (other than WarCraft III) and has gameplay to match.

Total Annihilation is set thousands of years in the future. Mankind has split into two factions: the Core and the Arm. It seems that human scientists during the age of space exploration and colonization discovered a way to transfer the mind and consciousness of a human being into a machine, providing immortality. Half of humanity said "Great!" and had themselves placed in a mechanical body with a computer for a brain that never aged or suffered disease. The other half was appalled by this behaviour, shocked that others would give up their human forms so easily.

The new machine-people became known as the Core, and the fleshy people, still humans like us, became the Arm. Pretty soon, the conflict developed into a full-scale war.

Flash forward 4,000 years. Yes, you read that right, and it's not a typo. After four millenia of total war, the two sides have almost wiped each other out. Their bases and armies have been destroyed, and all that's left are a few random bits, a few hundred alive on this planet, a few thousand on that. Amazingly, these two sides hate each other so much that the few survivors continue to fight each other on the virtually destroyed worlds that are all that remain in the ravaged galaxy.

To quote the opening cinematic, "For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete annihilation of the other."

The player chooses to become the Commander of a group of Arm or Core soldiers, and lead that side to victory over the other. The game offers fifty campaign missions, plus many custom maps to play on, with pile-ons of up to ten players.

As stated above, the game is a Real-Time-Strategy game, one of the earlier examples of that genre, but head and shoulders above any RTS made before it. The graphics are phenomenal, with every structure and unit a rendered 3D model. Units will walk as smoothly as one's video card will allow (which is quite smoothly using modern machines), unlike sprite-driven RTS games like StarCraft and Age of Empires whose movement smoothness is limited to the number of frames of animation included in the game.

The sound effects are also good, with different noises for different buildings and units. The explosions look and sound great, as do weapons firing. The terrain, though, is by far the most impressive, surpassing the visual quality of any other RTS ever made. The cliffs and rivers look almost photorealistic.

Gameplay is slow at times, fast-paced at others, and the game monitors and changes the music playing accordingly. This is an excellent touch, especially with the outstanding orchestral music included. This music is worth recording off of the CD and keeping for listening when not playing. It includes many tracks, but they generally fall into two categories: low, ominous music that plays during base construction and soldier organization, and loud, hearty music that plays during battle. It's the sort of quality music that supercharge one's feelings during play, and really makes it an experience.

It is possible to wake up on a Saturday morning, grab some provisions, play 15 hours of Total Annihilation, and go to bed, all without getting bored in between. The only concern will be actually getting to sleep: your mind will be racing, considering new strategies and looking forward to the next battle in the campaign.

Total Annihilation has an expansion pack, "The Core Contingency". This expansion back is also very good and worth the purchase. There are a couple other expansion packs available, but they are of low quality and are buggy when used together with the good expansion. The company tha created TA, CaveDog, also made a sequel that failed miserably and drove the company to bankruptcy.

Total Annihilation was truly the one great achievement of CaveDog, and if you aren't convinced yet, then I say again: go order it right now!