This game came out on Friday and it's been eating up a lot of time in my rotation since. Grey Goo is Petroglyph's revival of the classic RTS, i.e. base building, scouting, teching, and combat but with less of an emphasis on speed/APM compared to StarCraft. It's very much a spiritual successor to C&C but with many small streamlining/innovations that are going to make it hard for me to go back to other games. The biggest is how base building has been formatted to hot keys which bring up a visible menu along the bottom of the screen. The game makes it very quick to place structures and auto-queue units and I anticipate it will become second nature after a while. The game also puts a very interesting spin on base building and growth. The alien Betas primarily drop little hubs throughout the map; the Humans need to keep all their buildings connected to their central HQ but can teleport defenses anywhere along the grid accordingly; the titular faction, the Grey Goo are maybe the most unique and mobile faction I've seen in any RTS, as you start with a large Mother Goo that can traverse the map, slime over otherwise-impassable terrain, and split itself into other goos.
I also like how they approached teching, as tech is not about gaining stat bonuses or unlocking active abilities for units. Rather, tech gives passives that let you carve out a different play style, allowing the differentiation within factions that many RTS' attempt but rarely succeed.
Best of all, the music is composed by Frank Klepacki, who worked on the Westwood RTS' (yes Mirage, the Act on Instinct dude). A lot of the music reminds me of the Tiberium universe, with some epic space opera overtones.
The biggest surprise so far has been how great the cutscenes and story are. The campaign appropriately begins with the alien faction, the Beta, and it's sometimes stunning how lifelike they look in motion, it almost seems like live-action. The acting is great and while the game is not lore-heavy, I really like what they did with the background story and setting. Some really interesting Sci Fi ideas at play here.
I'm nearly done with the campaign and this is everything I could possibly want from a Petroglyph RTS. It's exciting to have a new game system like this and I'm looking forward to immersing myself in the metagame and uncovering hidden strategies once I get into the multiplayer.
