Hostile Waters (game)
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Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising is a hybrid vehicle and strategy game released on the PC in 2002 by the British company Rage Games Limited. It was inspired by an earlier game known as Carrier Command (Realtime Games, 1988).
A number of games were released around the turn of the millennium that were essentially Real Time Strategy but played from a first-person perspective. Other examples are Battlezone, Battlezone 2, and Uprising. These games were characterised by standard first-person controls for movement of the player's avatar and the use of equipment and weapons but also supplemental controls for giving orders to other units under the control of the player.
Hostile Waters takes place in a utopian future where war has been abolished. Old-school dictators have come up with a plan to scare the world into asking for their protection by engineering an artificial threat. The last war machine ever used is reactivated and deployed to stop them. This machine is an Adaptive Cruiser called Antaeus, which houses massive nano-assemby units capable of building whole vehicles in less than a second. Antaeus is sent to a chain of islands, where the dictators are establishing their power base, with one purpose - to stop them.
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[edit] Gameplay
Hostile Waters only has a linear campaign mode, which consists of 21 missions with a central story but little carryover in accomplishments, as with most RTS games. Each takes place on and near a fortified enemy island. The game's focus is small-scale vehicular combat, though mission objectives are generally more varied than killing everyone.
Hostile Waters features no research or base-building whatsoever. The player's only fixed 'building' is the Antaneus, immobile during missions (and destructible if very durable), which constructs units and can fire a very small number of heavy salvos in later missions after its main guns are repaired. Units are built with energy, which is gathered by recycling objects (most man-made ones are fair game) and wrecked enemy vehicles. A vehicle fitted with a recycler can reclaim and transmit energy remotely, or a transport helicopter can fly to an object and airlift it to the rear of the carrier. The carrier can analyze objects it deconstructs, and several of the game's vehicles and items are unlocked by sampling them. In contrast, the enemy has extensive installations with defensive, energy-generating and unit-producing buildings, though it can't rebuild.
Central to the game are the "soulcatcher" chips. These contain imprints of deceased former crew members of Antaeus that can be installed into vehicles. Vehicles can be built without pilots, but they then have no AI whatsoever, and the number of available chips is ten at best. Each pilot has its own distinct and colorful personality (often replete with bad language if it's enabled in the game options) along with their own preferences for vehicles, weapons and tactics. Ransom, for example, prefers helicopters and is very aggressive, often charging towards turrets that can take him down before he can do much damage to them. Patton complains loudly if his vehicle isn't fitted with the Warhammer howitzer and isn't land-based ("Son, I drive tanks!"). The personalities slowly gain experience over the course of the game and improve. Multiple copies of the same personality cannot be used simultaneously.
[edit] Control
Vehicles can be directly controlled by the player using the keyboard to move and the mouse to use weapons.
When controlling a vehicle it is possible to use hotkeys to issue orders to other units. The hot-key orders are issued in real time and require a quick sequence of key-presses. They usually represent the player selecting a unit to order, giving an order and then giving a target for that order. A target is either "Me", "The location I'm pointing at" or "The target I'm currently locked on to".
The order hotkeys are the same as the movement keys (WASD and QE as well as ZXC), so when you give an order the player can't move around. However, you can press three keys very quickly so it doesn't impair gameplay. The fact that you don't have to move your hand to give an order is a feature not normally seen in this genre.
There is also a tactical screen from which orders can be given to any vehicles equipped with a soulcatcher unit. Unlike the hotkey orders the tactical screen pauses the game. Also unlike the hotkey orders, it is possible to queue up several orders at once. This allows the player to create complex battle plans.
[edit] Vehicles
The game has a number of vehicles that are progressively unlocked as the missions progress. Vehicles contain a number of slots for equipment. Smaller vehicles contain a few unconnected small internal spaces, one or two squares in size, while larger ones have huge grids of internal space. Equipment items take up a number of squares and more powerful ones are shaped so that light vehicles are only able to contain them in limited amounts, if at all.
Vehicles have a single external weapon slot and the choice of weapon only affects the price, not the internal space. Some of the larger vehicles actually double-up their weapon, making it much more powerful.
Vehicles are given a keyboard shortcut on the numerical row (1 to 0), with the carrier activated by the ` key. Vehicles can also be grouped together using the ctrl-number combination familiar to RTS.
[edit] Limitations
The game was generally well reviewed, but its major problem is a lack of replay value. There is no "skirmish" or multiplayer modes, only a campaign mode, and that without a difficulty setting. After the campaign mode is finished, there is very little to entice the player to continue. The campaign is considerable in length and enjoyable for the most part, but it is quite disappointing to find it as the only option. No material is "unlocked" by completing the game either.
[edit] Story
The storyline was written by award-wining author Warren Ellis.
Earth 2032, twenty years ago the last war on Earth was fought, a battle not between nations but between the corrupt establishment and the people. The old guard fell and war was ended. For twenty years the world has been rebuilt as a utopia of plenty "whose grasp exceeds the moon and stands on the cusp of greatness". Until now.
From nowhere missiles begin landing worldwide killing tens of thousands. The location of the launch sites is discovered and a special ops team sent in to shut it down. They vanish... In desperation the order is given to reactivate the Antaeus program, a series of warships able to create any weapon using their on-board nanotech "creation engine". (The series never states who created them but it's possible they were created by the old guard and then defected to the people). Twenty years ago they were all destroyed. All but two were left on the seabed in case they were ever needed again. One never responds to the reactivation signal, but the other, Antaeus prototype 00, comes online. On-board are a series of "soulcatcher" chips containing downloaded minds of dead soldiers. The ship builds one human around one chip, you. The others will be used to pilot the weapons it creates, weapons for a war in a world that has forgotten how to fight.
But all is not good, because the people firing the missiles are the leftovers of the old guard fighting with thousands of troops and weapons they hid away when they knew the war was lost. They outnumber you ten to one, and there is worse because they have created something else. Something worse, something alien, something evil...
