GameRx: Rock Raiders

When discussing a real time strategy game, one almost exclusively thinks of generals with commanding views of the battlefield as two sides attack each other. The main thing about most RTS’s is that, like most games, their core mechanic relies on combat. Granted, there is some historical and cultural significance of martial tradition in strategy, RPG’s, and first-person combat, but it’s important to realize that there are successful non-violent iterations of these three. Simply put, combat is easy to program. You calculate movement, hit chance, and damage, which repeats until someone dies or something explodes. However, the games that stand out the most to me are ones that aren’t reliant on combat systems, using them instead as a utility or for emergencies. This sort of game can come from any genre, including RTS; even though the genre’s origin is so deeply rooted in military tradition, it can be and has been done successfully.

To take a look at a well-crafted and non-combative RTS, we’ll be taking a look at the fine specimen Lego Rock Raiders, a cult classic RTS from the popular Lego PC game line. Don’t be fooled by the colorful cartoonish exterior, for inside is a surprisingly difficult game. Not to be confused with the similar PS1 game, Rock Raiders is based off the namesake line of sci-fi Lego kits from the late 90’s. Your spacecraft, the LMS Explorer, has been damaged in an asteroid field and subsequently sucked through a wormhole, transporting your ship and crew to a distant galaxy. To save your craft and crew, you must order your team of miners and specialists around a series of caverns to collect enough green energy crystals to power your escape. But the caverns are not without dangers of their own as your oxygen supply dwindles and native alien life takes interest in your activities. Can you lead your crew safely back to Earth?

The gameplay carries the unmistakable aroma of Molyneux’s much-praised Dungeon Keeper (even going as far as to include a first-person manual override for any miner in play) as you try to gather the resources needed to repair and refuel your marooned spaceship. The cave is split into large squares, each of which is enough to hold one small installation. Your miners enter the cave via the standard-issue teleporter pad, the only building that does not require power, and automate work and upkeep diligently until you give them other orders.

When you begin any scenario, you start in a small cave with a few miners and/or a building or two. Unexplored areas around you are filled with rock from your perspective, but each square of the map is filled with a different types of rock that are easier or more difficult to drill through, ranging from dirt that melts away under your jackhammer to hard rock that needs to be destroyed with dynamite. Rubble slows you down but can be cleared with shovels, and constructing paved paths for your miners gives them speed bonuses over different routes. When drills aren’t fast enough, you can build facilities to teleport vehicles to the planet to dig out the caverns.

Things start to get interesting with resource management. The four resources at your disposal are miners, ore, energy crystals, and oxygen. Ore is required for pretty much any tangible object you want to create, so it is the bread and butter of any expansion or construction project. Energy crystals are used in constructing high-level buildings, but their primary function is to provide power to the base as they are fed into the power generator; most buildings will cease to function without power, so it’s a good idea to hold onto them until you absolutely need them for something else. Both of these can be find as you explore, so you’ll find plenty of both over the course of a mission.

Miners are needed for work, of course, but they use oxygen and food as they work — plastic people need air and food too, you see. The oxygen brings an interesting feedback loop in a mechanic that encourages air quality management. Using more workers will get things done more quickly, but they’ll use up the air more quickly than a few workers will. After you build the structure that controls air quality, you have to decide how much energy you want to apply to air management. If you’re tight on crystals, what do you shut down? Do you shut off the air to use your facilities, or do you sacrifice fluidity for safety? On top of that, you need to keep your miners well-fed in order to keep them at top efficiency; they won’t die if you don’t feed them, but they won’t be very focused. I don’t recall finding a game with similar mechanics combined before, so it’s worth consideration.

Your crew’s inventory and skills are largely custom- izeable. Every crew member you beam down starts with a jackhammer and usually grabs a shovel from the nearest supply hub upon landing. Either of these can be replaced with a number of other devices, like dyna- mite and ray-guns, depending on the needs of your operation. Once you build the right facilities and sufficient resources, you can train your miners to specialize in different roles such as geologists, pilots, and engineers. These each provide you with some bonuses that add to the efficiency of your team by letting your miners multitask to an extent. I didn’t find them particularly useful except for the pilots and drivers, but that’s probably just my playstyle more than anything.

As far as hostile elements go, damage to your dudes is largely a result of environmental damage. This tends to be largely caused by randomly generated rockslides, which are instantaneous affairs that happen at the base of any cave wall made of loose material. These can only be stopped by equipping a miner with a hammer and reinforcing the wall with a few pieces of ore. This prevents any rocksides on that wall and adjacent walls, but it also prevents drilling in that zone. You should also be aware of other environmental damage sources like dynamite, mining lasers, and vehicles, all of which can be easily avoided with proper diligence. You must also be aware of alien life; large Rock Monsters sometimes crawl out of the walls, looting your HQ for an energy crystal luncheon, and Slimy Slugs will suck the energy out of your crystals and force you to recharge them at your power station. Of course, being a Lego game, no miners and monsters actually die. Miners are beamed up when they run out of health points, Slimy Slugs are scared back into their den, and Rock Monsters break into several tiny monsters that run away. Not that this is a problem — just something to note.

Perhaps the only problem with this game is that there isn’t quite enough adversity. The monsters come very infrequently with no real way to predict when they’ll appear an can be quite tough to beat when they do, but the game is pretty quiet in between. The main point of any map is to explore and to gather resources to explore and dig for more resources faster. If Minecraft felt especially tedious to you, this might not be your cup of tea. It’s nothing like Minecraft except that both have caves, but it does require a certain degree of patience and curiosity to drive the game forward.

This is one of the only non-combat RTS’s I’ve played (aside from a couple of games by Funatics Software, but more on them another time), and it really does have an interesting spin in the way things work. The twenty-five missions of the campaign are surprisingly well-designed, bringing a large allowance for choice in how to complete each mission. The game itself moves fast enough that it isn’t tedious but slowly enough to remain playable, which is always a difficult balance to maintain in an RTS. When combat does occur, it tends to be short and simple, if challenging, letting you return to your base operations without dwelling on deeper tactics. It was generally received well in reviews at the time; the only major complaint from the big magazines at the time was that the lower threat and the focus on engineering and planning over combat prowess was a bit boring, but the game broke so far from the generic RTS formula that it was perhaps disinterest more than lack of stimulation. If you like RTS and are up for a bit of a challenge, you should definitely at least download this game to give it a look over and see how a logistics-heavy RTS with mnimal combat feels to you. Honestly, I think we need more like this one out there.

Doc Watson is an editor for The RedShirt Crew and founder of The GameRx Clinic. He’s pretty much convinced himself that the luminescent green energy crystals are actually tiberium, and something in the back of his brain tells him something about an Alien crossover. If you have any questions, comments, or other input, leave a comment below or send a tweet to @DocWatsonMD