Meridian: Squad 22

I was torn in deciding whether to recommend this or not, but in the end I have to say no. It has elements that, if tweaked, I feel the game would be so much more enjoyable. Pro's: 1) Decent story, although there is a slight pause between each dialogue startup. 2) The way the resource gathering is designed is very similar to Starcraft, one of my favorite RTS games. 3) The levels have a very nice looking design and they make the attempt to be different from the previous map. Con's: 1) Not nearly enough units can be produced. Starcraft and C&C 3 Tiberium Wars were so much more enjoyable to me because they allowed for a huge amount of units to be on the map at once. This game requires you to basically expand to another mineral patch before being able to build more units. 2) The maps do not let you place buildings anywhere you want. No matter where I try to build the building space always seems to be red. The same applies for where units can explore. Sometimes it looks like...

If you've never played meridien before then prepare for frustration. There's no manual/user guide - you either have to fumble around yourself to work out how to do things or ask the (extremely friendly and helpful) community. However, having to keep pausing the game to go log a question on the forum and waiting for an answer makes this game more of a turn-based game than a RTS... It may be fun to play once you know how to play it, but... it depends how patient you are and how much of a pain you want to be by keep posting questions on game-play at the forum.

The AI clearly cheats, you cannot repair your vehichles, your buildings, or heal troops except with a commander ability with a 45 second cooldown. The AI has prebuilt bases, and instant-spawning cheats apparently. So the campaign is garbage. Your only artillery is seaborne. Oh, you need to crack some turrets without naval support? Tough fucking luck. Your planes are the old wooden-canvas types. Not by technology level, by sturdiness. I know that even modern aircraft could be taken down by a single bullet, but keep in mind that hitting something that goes MACH 2 is the main defence against bullets in the aircrafts case, and if it is being stationery to be shot at (like in this game) it will be garbage (like in this game). Update: Also, would like to point out the complete and utter moronic logic behind "short range anti-tank long range anti-infantry" derpism. And the fact you cannot see the range of the units, until you try them out in actual combat. Or the retardness of the research ...

The A.I. of your units is not the best and sometimes not even good. In the campaign for every episode you have to do tech-research almost from the beginning every time. This is little stupid I think since it is a campaign. Sometimes it looks like explorable terrain but your units can't really go anywhere. In lot of maps you just feel like you're defending against nonstop waves of enemies that keep appearing from off the map. It gets repetitive very fast.

Meridian Squad 22 is your standard modern RTS however instead of research or set units/upgrades per map you can choose your own via a tech tree of unlockables. By standard I mean, you build a base, train units, blow up the enemy base… or! Do a story mission controlling your unique characters. You have food limits so you can’t just swamp the map, microing your units makes you extra powerful in this. You can make unit compositions that work well together too. Air units are fragile but easily the best unit once you get a swarm going but cost more food than infantry. Vehicles are slow and get blown up easy. The main story made sense and the game play was enjoyable however only about 6-7 hours long if you can micro units well. One thing that I found jarring is you cannot repair your base with another means but the main single method of repairing and keeping units alive- a command skill that is cast in an area. This means base defences are not ideal unless you’re food capped sin...

This would have been a "goodish" game in the early 90s, when one did not expect things like working AI and pathfinding.

A fantastic old-school RTS with an innovative research system. At the time of writing this review, there are only 4 campaign missions available, but it's all really great. I can't wait to find out where the story is going. The music and sound effects also blew my mind and to me, these are easily the highlights! There's also a Conquest mode which gives you randomly generated missions to play. I can see how this could get repetitive in the long run, but for now it works really great! A thumbs up from me, I definitely recommend this game!

This is a small scale game. A pickup once and playthrough game, both campaign and extended skirmish. But at the same time despite its short playtime and little replay value its a nice cheep little RTS with allot of heart put into it (as far as I am aware one guy made most of this, I could be wrong). Reminds me of a mix of Halo Wars and Starcraft. I see allot of complaints about unpolished and not up to the par of modern RTS but at the end of the day thats asking allot from a small studio that wants to put out a product. While I would agree there are elements that can use improvement like larger maps, more factions, a better and larger unit cap system (larger zoom out, better unit stats display, simply allot of little things that honest I at least don't mind because the game is playable and most RTS games have their UI quirks you just need to get used to on some level). I play allot of RTS games, this one is not bad and I have played far worse. I bought it cause I wanted to support t...

Squad 22 isn't perfect. Right off the bat, there's no true skirmish mode, which is an odd ommission. There's no mod support, which is unfortunate. And many of the campaign missions are very "find the right build pattern" in nature. Never-the-less, it's awesome: The bad guys are called Skeleborgs, which is more Warhammer 40K than actual Warhammer 40K. The gameplay plays fairly akin to Starcraft, but with naval and technology layers. Maps are just begging for you to explore them. The game is very biased to singleplayer, with multiple ways to play. I mentioned that there's killer skeletal robots called Skeleborgs, right? Squad 22 is likely worth more than they're actually asking for, you'll definitely get your money's worth.

First mission. Built too many drones. Can't create more farms. Can't order troops to kill drones. I defeated myself.