Foresight – Review
With almost no RTS games being released lately, Strides Interactive and KISS ltd are trying to shake the market with Foresight. Foresight is a space-based RTS game that lets the player take command of huge space fleets, make strategic decisions and decimate their opponents.
Story
The game takes place in space. After a nuclear war took place on Earth, the survivors gathered and tried rebuilding civilization. All weapons were destroyed and after they established the beginning of a new era, humans were then known as the United Nations Confederation (UNC). In the meantime, Earth is slowly dying and humanity is in need of a new home, far away from any weapons or violence. In order to make sure these events never happen again, the Council of Foresight was made. You play as Thomas Lock, a cadet at the UNC Command Academy. Your job is to do whatever the UNC requests of you.
While this might sound like an interesting story, it really isn’t. The story isn’t explained whatsoever in the game, but if you still want to know what’s going on, you’ll have to read up on their website. The missions you get throughout the game have no story whatsoever: kill this, escort these people, harvest this many resources, … It’s a very simple and boring story with no depth to it whatsoever.
Graphics
Foresight’s graphics aren’t the prettiest, but this can be overlooked since it’s an indie game. The game looks about 5 years old and it’s not a spectacular sight, but the explosions look pretty nice though. However, while the game itself doesn’t look good, the artwork in cutscenes looks great! Props to them!
While the game isn’t the best looking, you’d expect it to run pretty good, well it doesn’t. During a big fight the game sometimes drops to 10 FPS with a medium range setup and when you leave the V-Sync option on you’ll probably experience input lag from your mouse, which is a no-go for RTS games!
Sound
Sound is another field this game doesn’t excel in. The voice acting is simply terrible and the music isn’t the greatest either. It would have been better to just get rid of the voice acting and keep the subtitles as reference. The music itself is very loud, sometimes to the point where you can’t hear the voice acting (maybe this is a good thing?), but it can be adjusted in the options menu.
Sound effects are another field, most of them sound OK but if you have a massive force you’ll get spammed by your units alerting you of being attacked and all the bullets will just hurt your ears.
Gameplay
Last but not least we have the gameplay, and it’s pretty much in line with the rest of the topics, not the greatest. When first playing, you’ll have to get used to the controls, but since there’s no way to rebind them or access them, it’s pretty much trial and error. A lot of the game’s functions are hidden since there’s just not enough explanation. The game tries to help you out the first couple of missions with a few hints here and there, but it remains a self-help game.
Foresight does have the basic RTS functions however. You build structures, harvest resources and make a shit ton of units. An added unique feature however is the Fleet System, which is one of the only interesting features of this game.
The Fleet System makes it able to make simple organisational units and easily command them. Each fleet consists of a fleet commander and an optional fleet adviser. The fleets have a maximum capacity to them depending on the commander, so you can only fill them up to a certain point. Fleet commanders also communicate with the player, they will request fleet reinforcements, suggest strategies to the player and go on scout missions on their own. All you have to do is simply accept their request and they’ll go, which is pretty convenient.
Another interesting feature is the sector map and while it’s not the easiest to use, it’s a cool feature. The battlefield is built out of sectors, connected to eachother with Wormholes. The sector map will show you a variety of colors and data: it shows the connectivity between sectors, activities or information on units, current location of fleets and the current situation (traveling, holding ground, …).
There’s also a lot of things wrong with the game however, first off is the AI. With a game that is heavily reliant on AI, it’s not good that Foresight’s AI is so bad. The AI (for both sides) seems to only attack the first thing they see, it doesn’t make any difference between units and buildings. You might let your units attack a base while doing something else, come back, and see that they were all killed by enemy ships because they felt like prioritizing a building.
The second issue is variety. There’s very little unit variety and even less building options. You have 2 types of bases, your power supply, refinery for harvesting resources, a shipyard and a couple of turrets. The other 2 factions (Slavic Sirerians and North-South American Union) have exactly the same buildings but with different names and appearances.
Third and last issue is the multiplayer. The game features a campaign, skirmish and multiplayer mode. The campaign mode is pretty boring and the skirmish mode is alright, but the multiplayer mode is as inconvenient as it gets. In order to play with someone else, you need to enter their IP address, so it’s hard to play against any opponents besides your friends. You could go on a forum and search for people, but it’s extremely unsafe to give out your IP address to strangers. Hopefully there will be some kind of server/quick match module implemented, but right now this is far from true.
Conclusion
With very little strategy games being released lately, a lot of hopes were put into Foresight to bring some pleasure. However, we’re presented with a mediocre game that has some interesting features here and there, but has a lot of flaws in the other ones. The game probably would have gotten a better reception if it was released as beta or early access, but right now it looks and feels unfinished. However, the developers are communicating with the players and are rapidly pumping out patches, so maybe in a couple of weeks it will actually be a decent, functional game.
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[…] Foresight, the space RTS game by Kiss Ltd and Strides Interactive has just received a major patch. At the time of launch, it didn’t really seem that good of a game, but we concluded that it would be a lot better after a few patches came out. Luckily, Strides Interactive has been communicating a lot with the community to find out what kinks need to be worked out, and this first big patch proves to solve a lot of them! You can now expect re-assignable shortcuts, big improvements to the multi-player and a lot of bug fixes. Detailed patch notes can be found here! […]
While the initial release of the game was horrible, it’s now looking really nice.
They have added lot of improvements relating to everything mentioned above, multiplayer improvements are coming next, there is even word going around about changing the voice actors people seem to dislike.
People should give the game a look, developers seem to really be interested in making it better and it keeps getting better.
Perhaps the initial release was a tad too soon. a Longer earlier access period tends to work charms for certain games.
We were asked to take a second look, and if we can squeeze in a second testing period, we will probably do a short update on the matter. 🙂
Hi Radioin,
Yes, we’ve changed voice actors that people seem to dislike entirely. Multiplayer is now online, with a lobby, no need for IP address or port forwarding. All you’ll need is a Steam account. Of course, we can’t control how the data flow across the Internet. Bottlenecks will be prevalent where games are hosted across huge distances. Ie, from Singapore to Germany.
A lot of improvements have been made not just based on user feedback but also several “over the shoulder” observations as well. Unit recognition has been improved, camera zooming is increased as well.
TL;DR – please try the game again. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it better this time.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Dear all,
This is Jeremy, developer/producer of Foresight. It has been some time since this post was posted; we’ve been working hard on the game itself, based on feedback from the community to improve the game.
Right now, most if not all of the game design issues have been dealt with and we have full multiplayer capability, along with some new features such as research and upgrade that can turn the tide of the battle. There’re many other issues we’ve fixed and improved since launch. (such as key binding)
As such, we’ll like to invite you guys to take a second look at Foresight. This time, I believe it’ll be good enough.
Thanks!
Jeremy