Earth 2160

Earth 2160 is a real-time strategy game released in 2006, the third entry in the Earth series, and it picks up after the literal destruction of the previous game's planet. Survivors from the Eurasian Dynasty, the United Civilized States, the LC, and the alien Morphidians are now scrambling on Mars and beyond. Each faction plays meaningfully differently, which is the first thing a strategy player should care about: the ED's modular base system lets you snap building components together like a construction kit, while the Morphidians lean on organic, hive-style structures. That asymmetry is the game's genuine selling point, and it holds up better than most of the rest of the package. The campaign gives you a full narrative through each faction, with FMV cutscenes that scream mid-2000s budget production but at least keep the plot moving. Mission design is hit-or-miss. Some maps hand you interesting resource puzzles and force smart base placement; others just throw waves of enemies at you until your defenses crumble from boredom. The tech trees per faction are deep enough to reward a second or third playthrough, and understanding build order matters here more than in the genre's more casual contemporaries. Veterans will find the difficulty spikes on later missions genuinely punishing, not artificially so. Where Earth 2160 stumbles is in the fundamentals. Pathfinding is erratic, a well-documented problem in 2006 that no patch fully fixed. Units pile up, miss obvious routes, and occasionally walk into enemy fire when a slight detour would save them. The AI in skirmish mode is aggressive but not clever, exploiting unit numbers rather than positioning or economy management. If you are used to modern RTS AI or StarCraft II's skirmish opponents, this will feel like a step back. The interface also shows its age: no widescreen support out of the box, and getting the game running cleanly on modern Windows often requires community patches and some manual config file editing. The mod ecosystem never grew into anything substantial, so do not factor that into your calculus. What you are buying is essentially the base game and a handful of community fixes. For a strategy player who wants to understand the RTS landscape of that era, or who specifically remembers the Earth series fondly, there is genuine value in the faction depth and the modular construction mechanics, which were ambitious for their time. Newcomers to strategy games should look elsewhere first; this is not a tutorial-friendly title. But if you have 40-plus hours in genre classics and want something obscure with real mechanical texture, Earth 2160 scratches a specific itch that few games from that period attempted. The 73% Steam rating and the 73 Metacritic score both tell the same story: a game with notable ideas and notable rough edges in equal measure. Approach it as a piece of strategy history with a functional core rather than a polished modern experience, and you will get more out of it than the mixed reviews might suggest. Diego, Scout Team