Silica is an upcoming RTS and First-Person Shooter hybrid that basically asks the question of what you get when you mix Arma III and Starship Troopers. It's also a little bit Arma meets StarCraft with the sandboxy FPS blending with the human versus alien RTS on offer. The crossover is coming by way of Bohemia Interactive thanks to its Bohemia Incubator label, which aims to give indie developers more resources to build the games of their dreams.
Silica aims to blend real-time strategy elements with first-person shooter gameplay as players will be able to take the role as either the commander of the army or as one of the boots literally on the ground, doing the fighting. Set on the fictional world of Baltarus in the distant future, there currently are three factions to choose from: two human factions hailing from either Sol or Alpha Centauri and the Aliens.
In a preview event last month, I had the chance to give the new title a go with fellow journalists to see how the action holds up. Jumping into the role of a soldier in the Human Centauri army, I set out to destroy the alien menace - and put to those Sol dwellers as well.
Visually, Silica looks like it's leveraging some pretty impressive tech to showcase its vision. The desert planet of Baltarus is a wasteland, with craggy cliffs and seas of sand separating you and your enemies. Dust plumes spun around me as I fought to discern whether I saw units in the distance or if they were heat mirages leading me astray. The gigantic human structures towered over me as I ran around our base, other ground troops and vehicles racing around me waiting for orders from our commander on high.
From an RTS standpoint, Silica is serviceable. You build your base by collecting Balterium with giant, slow-moving harvesters that remind me a bit of the Spice harvesters in Dune. From there you can build additional buildings to augment your forces, command AI troops and even give commands to your player troops to try to steer combat in the same direction.
I found playing as the Commander a bit confusing at first as it felt as though the RTS elements were one note. There wasn’t much to do other than just direct units and build additional silos at one point. I never really felt that moment-to-moment tension that other RTS titles can offer, such as StarCraft or Age of Empires.
Only one player can be the commander at a time, which is probably for the best when you think about it. Conflicting orders isn’t always the best. It also works best when you’re on a voice call with your teammates as you can better coordinate, especially with an army of AI units at your beck and call as well.
Since there is only one resource right now, Balterium, it makes harvesting a bit one-note as well - though these harvesters are everything. Enemies as they attacked when for them first, making it key to keep a force of units back to defend at all costs. One moment saw a hulking, crab-like Goliath start to just wreck our Harvesters while most of our troops were out of the base hunting the Aliens in the open. I had to scramble to send vehicles back quickly enough to deal with the Goliath, but at that point it was a bit too late.
That failure now in the books, I jumped from the role of Commander and joined the forces on the ground, taking control of a new Scout unit. If no player takes on the role of the Commander, Silica’s AI takes over, which is a nice touch that makes sure that new units and buildings are always being added to your faction. In a large multiplayer game, this is really good as it allows everyone to jump into the fight themselves and focus on their own localized part of the action.
In a single-player game, though, I found it frustrating to jump back and forth as the AI would always make decisions I didn’t agree with. One game saw me converging a large number of my forces on a collision course with the Alien base in the south of my map. I jumped into a unit to take part in the fight and as I got close,I noticed all my units had peeled off, each going in various directions and not at all where I wanted them to be. I jumped back into Commander mode to see it had given them all new orders and instead of attacking, they were scouting all the unexplored areas of the map, despite the enemy base being vulnerable.
I can only hope that those AI quirks get ironed out, or there is some system put into place to keep the orders you give units in perpetual motion, regardless of whether you’re in Commander mode or jump to the first-person gameplay. As it stands now, it’s an annoyance, but it’s not a deal breaker.
For me, the boots-on-the-ground experience was much more compelling than the RTS gameplay. Bohemia’s fantastic first-person shooting combat is on full display here, and I loved how each of the various guns worked, from the lowly scout rifle to the powerful heavy armored rocket launcher.
One area of concern in Silica might be its map size, though. These maps are legit huge and it could take ages to run across to an objective that might be dead by the time you get there. Thankfully you can commandeer vehicles that are spawned and control them on the battlefield, from the fast, but lightly armored Light Vehicle to the powerful tank that can light up even the strongest of enemy Crabs.
To also get around the map size being a detriment to dropping into battle, there is a fairly generous teleporter which allows you to effectively drop into any space you’ve explored. So if you die during action and respawn back at your base, you’re not that far away from being able to jump back and help your team out.
Firefights are fun, especially at night. Silica features a full day and night cycle, though watching laser arc through the air at a distance while looking at the night sky on the horizon was mesmerizing. It is also a great visual indicator of where the action is currently.
As the fighting ebbed and waned across our play session, my faction’s base started to be pushed to the brink by the combined forces of the other Human faction as well as the Aliens themselves. Watching a giant Behemoth skitter across a refinery is a humorous sight indeed, though that humor doesn’t last long as the dawning realization that I need to take down that Behemoth slowly starts to unravel in my mind.
Aliens themselves look pulled from a combination of regular sci-fi media and Lovecraft’s discarded Eldritch horrors. They are insanely fun to watch skitter across the sand, though personally, I didn’t quite like playing as them too much. The regular grunt called a Horned Crab felt a bit too squishy, even when fighting Human ground troops, and I could never quite figure out the best way to attack with them as the large horns never felt like they connected when I used them.
However, they are fast and can cover ground so quickly that it made jumping back into the fray as a Human footsoldier feel sluggish by comparison. One way to fix that is by claiming a vehicle, which you can effectively do from across the horizon by aiming at it and pressing E. This will actually send the vehicle hurtling towards you, so like…move out of the way as I was run over quite a few times.
One thing that Silica feels like it’s lacking is variety. While there are three factions and over 20 unit types, the two humans are identical There is no differentiating between Centauri and Sol-based humans other than whether they appear as enemies on your radar. Bohemia says that this is coming, and the factions will be based on the lore they are building for Silica itself. In the future, Sol humans are more tech-oriented, while the Centauri are more geared toward brute force, especially with their vehicles. So while the vehicles in the Human factions in early access are going to be more along the lines of the Sol faction, Centauri’s might have vehicles that have thicker armor, and more firepower but are more vulnerable to the projectiles from Sol’s tech.
Additionally, while there are no flying units in the game just yet, Silica will have them for all the factions. I’m just imagining now the flying Aliens swopping down and picking up a player, only to drop them to their grave below.
All in all, Silica feels like it’s a great entry point to the overall idea of an RTS and FPS hybrid. It’s not there yet, and hopefully Bohemia Interactive allows this early access period to take as long as it needs for the Incubator to truly work here. But I’m eager to jump into more Silica as it matures in the coming months. I think there is an audience here, especially those players who love RTS games, but want to work with real players to achieve the end goal on the ground.
Silica is available today on Steam Early Access.
