Game Over Online ~ Heavy Duty (c) Akella

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Heavy Duty (c) Akella

Published: Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 08:46 PM
Written By: Lawrence Wong

Akella’s upcoming title, Heavy Duty, is developed by Primal Software. The piece de resistance of the game is the graphics engine, which lets it paint an entire living and breathing world without breaking the globe up into geographical regions. In the preview build of the game, we literally zoomed out of a skirmish taking place in front of us, rotated the globe until we got to the other side of the planet to initiate the next battle. All of this is seamless without any loading times at all.

At its heart, Heavy Duty is a tactical real time strategy game. In addition to issuing commands to other units, you can also take control of any unit in a squad. There seem to be fewer units involved so you’ll have to be judicious with how you use your units. In the preview we saw from Akella, we were able to command our squad to engage a group of enemies while taking up a sniping position to set up crossfire on the enemy units. Control of your in-game persona is done using the traditional WSAD keys with the mouse acting as your aiming cursor. At any time, you can zoom out and monitor other parts of the battle so again, the game is one seamless map; not broken up individual levels or stages.

One of the neat things we were able to do in the game was use terrain to our advantage. This is more than simply getting on top of a hill to get a greater vantage point, although you are able to do that too. In one battle, we found enemy units clustered beneath a very high mountain. By shooting at the boulders on the cliff with the unit we directly controlled, we were able to cause debris to fall on the enemy units, thereby eliminating them without jeopardizing the squad. You can control any unit that is manufactured, although in our preview we only saw the control of land based units.

Since the world is one seamless entity, any damage you do to the terrain is also permanent. So if you happen to burn down large chunks of forest or make gigantic craters, these can be used to your tactical advantage.

Heavy Duty appears set in the distant future. You’ll see the usual mechanized units, lasers, rockets and bombs that you see in other games. The unit we primarily saw in action was a four legged robot though we were told that there will be many other units in the game with many weapons that you can scavenge and customize.

To power all of this, Heavy Duty will require a pretty beefy computer. Even during our preview, we saw some slowdowns and evidence that the preview build we saw was definitely still work in progress. With the release date for Heavy Duty not until Q1 2007, though, Primal Software and Akella will have some time to iron the kinks out.