The Hive

The Hive is a single-player real time strategy game set in underground caverns in an alien world. You lead an army of insectoid creatures through ten stages, building up a relatively simple engine for generating resources and troops to crush your opposition and meet each stage's goals. The game sports a few puzzles, has a few choices for developing your army's stats which persist between stages, allows you to keep looted items that can be equipped on any unit that boost their attack, defence and health, as well as giving them a few extra abilities. Overall the game leaves quite an initial impression, but as you progress these components start to feel thinly spread.

There are four buildings; a hive that heals nearby units and spawns non-combat and special units; barracks that build combat units; a worker's den that allows you to upgrade your army's capabilities; and turrets that automatically defend within a certain radius. You have the potential to build seven units; workers which mine minerals and harvest food (the two major resources), as well as open chests and dig through rubble; melee troops; ranged troops; a queen that can spawn workers in excess of their "soft" population limit, as well as spawn melee and ranged troops on the spot, and give a bonus to attack and defence to units in its vicinity; two units that you can develop through DNA research (a medic and an aerial scout, as well as a more powerful unit introduced by the plot later on).

DNA upgrades help make your units more potent. They can increase attack or defence, and can give the scout and medic one extra ability. DNA is garnered through loot, which drops from enemies and can be found in the environment. Some items exist solely to grant you DNA, and there are equippable items that can be traded for DNA as well, or attached to units to give them status upgrades, as well as life leech, poison damage, damage reflect, or a few other abilities (though these tend to be rarer drops). Drops tend to be better the higher difficulty you take.

The Hive has four difficulty levels, and strangely the second highest is the overall easiest. Survival is the only difficulty, implied by the descriptions on the selection menu at least, which allows you to keep troops from stage to stage. Since troops gain experience from kills, which grants them extra health, and they come pre-built when you start a later scenario, assuming they survived the last one, you are much better equipped to tackle a map in Survival than any of the other difficulties. The only real disadvantage to Survival is that resource nodes produce less total resources, but since the resources also carry over from stage to stage, this is never a problem for a reasonably miserly player.

There is a difficulty bottleneck in the fourth and fifth stages that is worth mentioning. The devs themselves have addressed it in the Steam forums, but it will doubtless continue to come up. Any difficulty where you start from scratch will have you scrambling to create an army, which then must, as is suggested on the forums, stay near your hive, running in circles from waves of enemies until healed, striking, repeating, until you have enough troops to hopefully take out the enemy, assuming your base is guarded well enough. We tried this very tactic, first on Hard, which eventually became such a chore that we quit and played it in Normal difficulty, which was eventually beaten. Otherwise, though, Normal feels all too straightforward. In Survival, however, starting with an army mollified the frustration significantly. Survival is, all-in-all, the preferred mode of the game.

What the game has going for it is its unconventional feel, and its mood. The music is wonderful; there are only a few tracks but they are full of mystery and awe and help inspire exploration for extra bits of treasure. The art assets are 3D and while not realistic are full of personality, and fine details on the units and scenery can be seen if you zoom in close enough. Most of the basic units are well animated, and the equipped items do feel like they make a difference in combat, even if there isn't a lot of variety in them.

The game's boss fights elevate it from a more predictable RTS experience, being more reminiscent to MMORPG battles where they telegraph their area of effect attacks allowing you a chance to move your units away; it's too bad your units aren't easy to move around nimbly. The F1 key can be used to find any idle worker, which is nice, but it's frustrating that you can't use similar functions to find stray troops, or to assign battle groups. Buildings, though few, aren't very restricted as far as where you build them, allowing for healing hives to act as waypoints, protected by turrets for example.

It is difficult, however, to recommend The Hive. Rather than indulge in a long list of troubles we'll stick to the essentials: the difficulty balance, something that's admittedly difficult to get right in any game, seems off. You either have it too easy, and thus it feels like slogging through hit point bars to finish the stage, or it's so challenging that manoeuvring and meta strategies are standard, but the latter isn't dynamic or involving enough to feel rewarding even when you exceed the enemy's development curve.

Some units other than the hive queen, when lost, sometimes don't drop their items into your inventory (we experienced this on Normal and Hard), meaning they're gone. Cutscenes remove control, even if a battle is raging, and this can mean that survival players might lose experienced units, even if they try to skip the cutscene. Skipping a cutscene can result in the camera being stuck at a low (uncomfortable but still playable) angle throughout the rest of the scenario, and if you're in the middle of a scenario and you need to quit, you will lose all progress.

When restoring the game keeps track of items, as well as units and resources in Survival, but only on a stage-by-stage basis, and the last stage in our Survival play-through remained locked when we returned to the game later, despite having reached it earlier. This lack of saves mid-game can be demoralising, because each stage may take hours to complete. The puzzles, while welcome and sometimes interesting, are rare and rarely very involved.

The plot is initially intriguing despite the jarring intro, but it feels as though there are a bunch of loose threads that aren't attached to anything. The mood is served when you don't know how things will reveal themselves, but when it becomes clear that it is just texture and there aren't any payoffs to the warnings and omens, it feels largely empty. Targeting units in combat can sometimes result in units just sitting there if you miss-click into a tangled mess of enemies, dodging boss attacks without retreating is rough, and pathfinding (another hard thing to program in any game) on big maps can sometimes make units freeze, even while they're being attacked.

Had the game featured more depth in its tech tree, buildings, unit selection, possible strategies, places to explore, side areas, puzzles, plot developments with payoffs, items, precise control, hotkeys, stages, enemy variation, a branching story, or perhaps a lower price, some of these problems could be more easily overlooked. At the time of writing, even with the promise of more gameplay in the future, it doesn't feel like enough.