Disney Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon

Battle at Procyon is one of the more surprising games to come out of a movie license, full stop. Built by Barking Dog Studios, the team behind Homeworld: Cataclysm, it is a real-time strategy game dressed in the aesthetic of 18th-century naval warfare transplanted into outer space. You play as Jim Hawkins, fresh out of the Royal Navy Academy, starting with a single torpedo boat and working your way up through war sloops, escorts, frigates, and eventually the fleet-anchoring StarHammer. The campaign runs 12 missions across the Etherium, pitting you against pirates, the speed-focused Procyon trimaran fleet, and the mystery of the iron-hulled Ironclads. Skirmish mode and LAN/internet multiplayer round things out, letting you take any of the three factions, configure allies and enemies freely, and run both scripted historical scenarios and fully open fleet-vs-fleet engagements. The mechanical depth here regularly surprises. Ships have component-level damage simulation: knock out an enemy's sails and it loses mobility, destroy its gun batteries and it goes silent, target the navigation and it drifts. Weapons span laserball and plasma cannons, beam weapons, Gatling guns, harpoons, torpedoes, mortars, fire launchers, net launchers, and gravity waves. You target specific hull sections by clicking the spot you want to hit, which is a more granular aiming system than most games in the genre bother with. Hard spots on iron-hulled vessels can even cause ricochets if you attack at a shallow angle. Panic Fire, which auto-triggers all loaded weapons banks against the nearest valid target, is a genuine emergency tool that rewards situational awareness. The crew assignment screen, where you allocate named crewmembers across Captain, Gunnery, Navigation, Rigging, and Spotter roles, adds another layer, though the number of individual stats per crew member tips into cluttered territory for a game otherwise aimed at a broad audience. The difficulty ceiling is genuinely high if you push it. On hard, ship positioning, engagement distance, and weapon loadout decisions from earlier in a mission can completely flip an outcome. The catch is that the campaign gives you only about four windows to customise your weapon hardpoints across all 12 missions, so loadout commitment matters in a way the tutorial never really prepares you for. The campaign pacing is also the biggest structural weakness: between engagements you are moving slow solar-sail ships across large sections of space, and there will be stretches where nothing happens for a while. Players chasing constant action will lose patience. The AI, meanwhile, is adequate on most missions but has at least one scripting-level breakdown documented by community players. For a newcomer to RTS games, this is actually a reasonable starting point. There is no base-building, no resource harvesting loop, no tech tree to memorise. The core interaction model is mouse-driven fleet orders, waypoints, and targeted fire, which is manageable within the first mission. The Etherium Forces mod on ModDB has extended the game's longevity noticeably, adding a large roster of ships and maps for anyone who finishes the campaign and wants skirmish variety. The visuals are naturally dated, but the cartoon-influenced art direction holds up better than a lot of contemporaries, and the environmental hazards such as meteor showers, nebulae, minefield corridors, and black holes that actually destroy ships on contact remain memorable setpieces. If you care nothing about the Treasure Planet IP, the mechanical case still holds: a naval RTS with component damage, faction asymmetry, and a mod scene is harder to find than you might expect. If you do have nostalgia for the film, the original story, the reappearance of Long John Silver and Admiral Amelia, and the continuation of Jim's arc make this feel like a proper sequel rather than shovelware. It is a short, focused experience, not a 200-hour commitment, and that is fine. Just know what you are buying: a tightly scoped fleet-combat game with a deliberate pace, some rough tutorial edges, and a higher skill ceiling than its Disney packaging implies.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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