The Hive

My instinct when I see 'RTS plus RPG elements' on a store page is to pull up the unit roster and check whether the hybridisation actually adds decisions or just papering over thin design. With The Hive, the answer is: a bit of both, and the atmosphere papers over more than it probably should. This is a singleplayer-only, campaign-driven real-time strategy set in a subterranean world called New Eden, and the production values in the art direction genuinely punch above the budget. Reviewers consistently flagged the visuals as a standout, with lush underground biomes ranging from spring-fed caverns to volcanic ruins that feel handcrafted rather than procedural. The world-building and lore hold up too. The fiction is surprisingly committed for an indie this size. On the mechanical side, the resource loop is tight but shallow. You manage two inputs: crystals, harvested from mineral veins to fund construction, and food, gathered from fishing spots or by slaughtering the turtle-like fauna to train and resurrect your troops. Mineral scarcity is the most interesting wrinkle the game has to offer. Maps rarely give you enough crystals for more than one of each structure type, which means hive placement becomes a real positional call, since each hive also projects a healing-and-resurrection aura that effectively determines where your front line can hold. That single tension is genuinely well-designed. Everything else in the building menu is thin: only four structure types total, which caps strategic variety pretty hard by mid-campaign. The RPG layer sits on top of that and, frankly, does not pull its weight. Units can level up and equip scavenged items, and you can dissolve unwanted gear to earn DNA, which unlocks the ability to summon additional unit types. In practice, most players report that the item management creates more friction than meaningful choice. The unit roster itself is serviceable: workers for resource collection, legionnaires as your standard melee, rhinos to absorb aggression, hunters for ranged output, medics for sustain, and the Hive Queen as a unique hero-style unit limited to one on the field at a time. A post-launch update added two more types, the Behemoth (a melee-ranged hybrid) and the Infestor (a damage-over-time specialist), which helps. The ten-act campaign runs somewhere in the eight-to-twelve hour range depending on pace, with one notorious difficulty spike in Act 4 where enemy pressure ramps faster than your economy can keep up. No skirmish mode, no multiplayer, no second faction to experiment with, so replay value is minimal. Bugs are a documented concern. Pathfinding has always been rough, and unit persistence between missions was historically unreliable. The developer, to their credit, has continued patching years after launch, most recently adding a Survival Mode DLC that carries your swarm across missions as a single persistent force, which is exactly the kind of structural addition that gives the core loop more weight. If that mode was part of your package, the value proposition improves meaningfully. For a straight playthrough of the base campaign, you are looking at a contained, atmospheric RTS with a decent story and a set of mechanics that feel one design pass away from something genuinely special. Players who bounced off its rougher edges compared it unfavourably to the RTS library it clearly draws from, but those who leaned into the lore and the colony-management tension found enough to finish it satisfied.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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