Remind yourself of how good real time strategy games were in the 90s with The Scouring.
Back in the 1990s (Christ, I’m old) PC gaming was swamped with real time strategy (RTS) games. If your game wasn’t a Doom clone, odds were that it’d be a point & click adventure or you’d be commanding tiny armies. I, like many from that era, loved playing these, and regardless of how bad I was at them I still enjoyed building a base with an economy to fund my army’s march to victory. As time went on, RTS games tried to streamline themselves. You’d either control hero characters and a handful of units, or have a ready to go base, and whilst these elements were fun and certainly sped up games, the overall sense of control was lost. The Scouring feels very much like classic Warcraft 2, but being in Early Access means it’s rather bare bones at the moment.
There’s no story to The Scouring at the moment, but more on that shortly. It seems that orcs and humans are taking up arms against each other for whatever reason fantasy armies like to fight. You command one force or the other in a bid for battlefield supremacy. Gather resources, build a base, muster an army, and then march into the strongholds of your enemies!
If you played the likes of Warcraft or Command & Conquer back in the day, you’ll feel immediately at home. The controls are exactly what you’ll remember, from contextual right clicking to numbered control groups, everything feels like it did thirty-some years ago. I have no complaints about this as it felt like putting on a comfy hoody that always seems to fit no matter what. Whilst there are new keyboard shortcuts to learn, all the other elements of gameplay are just what you want them to be. Build farms to feed your army, build barracks and associated buildings to generate troops, and upgrade your fortress to unlock new construction and research options.
An interesting twist here is that your workers aren’t just needed to gather wood and gold and construct buildings. Food isn’t just a resource that you get for having farms, and you need to assign workers to farms to keep food rolling in. You can purchase troops and workers and end up in negative food, starving your population who will work slower and start to die off, so this really needs to be a consideration. It’s a simple enough adjustment, but it gives different options for how to attack your enemy’s bases. If you can cut off their food supply, then they’ll immediately be weaker, much like wiping out power plants in Command & Conquer.
It’s worth mentioning that The Scouring is very much in Early Access at the time of writing, and whilst there’s a really solid looking roadmap for the next year or so, the current release is quite limited in scope. There’s no campaign yet, hence there being no story, so you’re limited to skirmishes against other players or the AI. These are fun enough, but I’m looking forward to playing through a story when the full game releases. The bigger issue is that the unit roster is really quite sparse at the moment, with only around half a dozen proper units for each of the two factions. In real terms, whoever has more troops in a skirmish tends to win as it stands. I’m not going to complain too much, as this is a very early release and functions really well, but don’t go into The Scouring at this stage expecting a huge roster. There’s a promise of aerial and naval units in future updates, as well as another faction, so there’s plenty to look forward to.
Hero mode is an interesting addition, which is somewhat like how Warcraft 3 would play. You only control a hero whilst base management and troop training is handled by the computer. You’ll go around, killing creeps and finding items in mini dungeons to power yourself up so that you can assault the enemy keep. There are a couple of special abilities, and you can order troops to follow you, but this mode feels quite undercooked at the moment with weak feeling abilities and uninteresting items. I hope this develops somewhat as it could be a fun little MOBA-like which would be a neat extra feature.
As it stands The Scouring is in a solid position for an Early Access RTS game. Whilst there isn’t a huge amount of content yet, the bones are there and they’re in good shape. Everything is thoroughly playable and functions well. As a throwback to classic strategy games, this is shaping up well, and even includes throwbacks to the art style for workers and comments from troops when you click on them. Whilst it’s hard to fully recommend right now, The Scouring is one to keep an eye on if you’re an old strategy head like myself.
The Scouring is available on Steam Early Access now.
