My first spoonfulls of Grey Goo were surprisingly tasty. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for a polished, traditional real-time strategy game not made by Blizzard. Developer Petroglyph’s outside-the-box faction design left me with an odd aftertaste regarding balance in potential competitive play, but it definitely hit the spot.

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The action takes place in the far future, where technologically advanced humans and a scrappy but noble alien race called the Beta face off against the Goo—self-replicating nanobots that seek to consume everything in their path. Allegiances change and new threats are revealed as events unfold, but there are no story-affecting choices to be made, and bonus objectives in each mission don’t carry over into any kind of advantage in future missions. It’s a setup that would have been par for the course when this type of game was in its heyday more than a decade ago, but has since been rendered almost rustic. Suffice it to say there are few surprises, but what’s here is well done.This conflict plays out across 15 campaign missions – five for each faction – and is presented with a generous helping of impressive cutscenes. It’s a lot of standing and talking in command rooms, with just a splash of glorious explosions, but the surprisingly good facial animations and voice acting serve to add meaningful context to the story. The selfless leader of the Beta, Saruk and the human-allied AI, Singleton, are notably complex and likable cornerstones of the cast – even if their arcs do closely mirror elements of StarCraft.While the density of the story keeps events moving at a nice clip, the fact that you only get five missions with each faction makes each segment feel a bit too much like an extended tutorial. By the time you’ve been introduced to all of your toys as the Beta, it’s already time to put them away and start the Human missions. Not until multiplayer will you really be able to explore the more complex strategies and synergies available within each army – which is a missed opportunity, because there are some extremely novel dynamics to play with.The action on the battlefield is a familiar song and dance to the RTS faithful, but the design of the Humans, Beta, and Goo is impressively asymmetrical. The standout is the Goo, a completely mobile swarm with no need for a permanent base. A Mother Goo can suck up resources from the map – or enemies she comes in contact with – and then move on to convert the material into units, meaning the Goo’s economy is a moving target. Goo globs can even ooze over mountains and obstacles, so it’s easy to slip away when you’re under attack. Plus, the lack of tech dependencies makes it possible for Goo players to spit out high-end units relatively quickly, giving them lots of rushing options.This makes the Goo probably the most unconventional l race I’ve ever played with in an RTS. It’s almost impossible to predict where a Goo player’s units are going to come from unless you have vision on every resource node on the map. Mother Goos can be used offensively as well, sneaking across otherwise inaccessible cliff faces and right onto your doorstep, where they can spit out units and start digesting your base as a melee-range siege weapon. My greatest victories as the Goo relied on my ability to use them in defiance of common RTS logic to catch opponents off guard, which can be a lot of fun.However, their power is kept in check by the attention required to micromanage multiple mobile, vulnerable Mothers while also trying to conduct battle on several fronts. That actually puts the Goo at a distinct, logistical disadvantage in the late game, when you can have 10 Mothers to deal with. This is a major finesse-style faction that only the best multitaskers will be able to handle effectively – if Zerg larva management gives you headaches, you’re going to need to get something prescription-strength for Goo play.Your opponent will be equally frustrated in a match against the Goo that runs the clock up, but for different reasons. A Goo player who has lost a decisive battle can easily turn the next 20 minutes into a frustrating hunt for the last few remaining mothers slinking around the map. Imagine if floating Terran buildings in StarCraft II could continue to collect resources and produce units while mobile, and didn’t require a command center to remain hidden, and you might get some sense of the problem.The ambitious faction design creates concerns with the Humans, too. All of their structures must be connected with a network of low-hitpoint power conduits, which forces some interesting base layout planning. The downside is that all your eggs are locked into that basket, and almost every map includes ramps and other obstacles that keep you restricted to a small region. That means the late game involves a lot of long-distance resource mining, forcing you to protect harvesters coming and going from far afield. The ability to teleport structures and turrets anywhere on the network is handy, but if the network is broken, everything loses power. It makes human bases extremely vulnerable, and recovery from losing a major battle on your own turf near impossible.The Beta, meanwhile, can build anywhere on the map, have arguably the best defensive structures, and don’t need to worry about conduit power. They even have the best of the three game-ending super-units, the Hand of Ruk, which acts as a mobile factory and mounts smaller units aboard to add firepower to its already massive area-of-effect cannon. It’s possible that the Beta feel so much more potent because they behave the most like a traditional RTS army, and thus their best strategies came to me more quickly and naturally than those for the other factions. Nonetheless, I’d expect the early days of Grey Goo multiplayer to be dominated by these guys, until the hardcore RTS community works out viable strategies to take them down.