Silica

My first instinct when loading into Silica was to wonder who on earth greenlit this idea, and then to immediately be glad they did. This is a game where one player in a 12-person lobby can pull up to a bird's-eye RTS view, deploy Harvesters to Balterium fields, build barracks and siege tanks, and issue orders to teammates who are simultaneously playing a first-person shooter on the ground below them. The concept sounds chaotic on paper. In practice, when it clicks, it genuinely feels like nothing else on PC right now. The setup is a three-faction sci-fi resource war set on the desert exoplanet Baltarus. Humans and two alien factions fight over Balterium, a powerful mineral that doubles as the in-game currency for everything you want to build or deploy. The core mode, Strategy, supports up to a three-way conflict and is where the hybrid design gets its fullest workout. One player per team steps into the Commander role, running the RTS layer from orbit while up to eleven others play infantry or pilot vehicles like the Light Quad, the Harvester, or the Siege Tank. Alien infantry get their own wrinkle: they can scale walls, cliffs, and rock formations in ways human soldiers cannot, which gives the asymmetric faction design some actual mechanical bite. Arena Mode is a straightforward deathmatch for unit testing, and the Scenarios mode (originally called Prospector) functions as a lighter PvE introduction that can be played solo or with up to four players. The rough edges are real and worth naming. The player base is small enough that finding a full, well-organized lobby is not guaranteed, and the FPS layer loses a lot of its shine when the Commander seat is empty or occupied by someone ignoring the team. Unit and class variety is limited for a game this ambitious, with no engineer role for vehicle repair and relatively few infantry options on the human side. Performance on mid-range hardware has drawn criticism, and the game has been in Early Access since May 2023 with no confirmed full-release date yet. Some players who picked it up at launch and returned later found the pace of content updates frustrating relative to the promise of the original pitch. What Silica does exceptionally well, though, is the moment-to-moment tension when both layers are humming together. A coordinated nighttime push, with lighting effects cranking up the atmosphere and a Commander actively directing the advance, produces a kind of large-scale combined-arms chaos that bigger-budget games rarely bother attempting. The asymmetric faction design means humans and aliens genuinely play differently at both the infantry and Commander level, and the three-way conflict option in Strategy mode adds a layer of diplomatic and tactical unpredictability that two-team modes rarely generate. This started as a mod for Emperor: Battle for Dune, and that scrappy origins story still shows in the best sense, with an obvious love for the genre underneath the rough spots. If you need a polished, fully-featured game right now, Silica is not there yet. If you are the kind of player who can rally a group of friends, fill the Commander seat, and tolerate an Early Access ceiling on content, you will find something genuinely original underneath the limitations. Go in with clear eyes about what is finished and what is still being built.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Silica.