BOID Single Player Campaign

My instinct when I see "primal RTS" on a store page is to roll my eyes - stripped-down usually means stripped-out. BOID mostly proves me wrong, though with enough asterisks to fill a mission briefing. The core loop is lean by design: no currency, no base construction, just spawn pools you capture, class conversion nodes you contest, and a constant pressure to keep moving forward. Momentum is the only resource that actually matters here. The class system is where the game earns its time. Seven unit types cover a rock-paper-scissors structure that rewards fast reads over slow planning. Scouts rush, Crabs brawl but plod, Kamikaze units threaten blobs, Guns punish melee stacks, Leeches drain and pin, Medics extend your frontline staying power, and Venom slowly poisons clustered groups. The trick is that most maps don't hand you all classes at once, so you are constantly recalculating what counters what with whatever nodes you managed to take. Optional secondary objectives in each mission reward completion with unit modifiers that carry real tactical weight, so burning a few extra minutes on them is worth the hassle. The minimap reads clearly and the mission briefing screens do a competent job of telling you what the AI will try. The friction points are real, though. Unit pathing gets sloppy when two large swarms meet - blobs merge into indistinct masses and your tactical composition evaporates into a scrum. The AI leans heavily on mass-rush tactics in a way that punishes any pause to rebuild, which is either thrilling or monotonous depending on your tolerance for constant forward pressure. Friendly unit aggression logic is passive unless you manually direct attacks, which on a fast map feels like fighting your own troops as much as the enemy. The story framing - comic-panel cutscenes, vague sci-fi setup on Kepler 42-C - is thin enough that you stop reading it by mission three. That is fine, because the campaign is not here to tell a story, it is here to run you through the class system at escalating difficulty across three settings: normal, hard, and extreme. The multiplayer angle is where I have to be straight with you. The online population was tiny even at launch and is essentially gone now. Ranked, unranked, and private 1v1 exist on paper, and there is a league system and a map editor, but finding a live match in 2025 is not a realistic expectation. The single-player campaign is the product you are buying here, full stop. At roughly 10 hours with replay value on higher difficulties, it is a reasonable self-contained package for RTS-curious players who want something that respects their time and does not demand a Warcraft III-level macro game. If you are an RTS veteran looking for depth, BOID will feel like a warm-up drill. If you are someone who bounced off every base-builder ever made, this might actually stick. Fred, Scout Team