There comes a time when an old mold must be broken to create a new one. That day is today. Ammobox Studios presents a unique take on their new title, Eximius: Seize the Frontlines. It is a new hybrid real-time strategy title mixed with the first-person shooter genre. With action for teams of five versus five, this is sure to up the ante in terms of your gameplay experience.
The top-down base building and unit control mixed with the first-person shooter aspect is one of the best features of this title. It is the highest touted feature in Eximius so it had better be. It can be a little confusing when you first try it out, especially with the squad-based controls of your officer units. There are two ways to play as a Commander or as an Officer. The Commander is responsible for controlling all of the units and building up your base whereas the Officer is the one on the frontlines trying to capture the control points. You head into battle with four other officers to counter the enemy forces. With the simple touch of a key, the screen changes, and you are placed into the Commander role and can see the scope of the map. Use your engineers to build new facilities which produce more units for battle. I feel like I switch from Call of Duty to Command and Conquer as I go back and forth.
At the first sign in you are taken through a pretty in-depth tutorial about the third person aspect of Eximius. There are other parts of the tutorial that I honestly didn’t go through because I have been playing Command and Conquer type RTS since they came out and that part comes pretty naturally. The lengths Ammobox Studios went through to make sure gamers knew how to play the game properly is evident. This is something I wish more game devs would do as sometimes I start a new game and new mechanics aren’t always shown properly. It is refreshing to get a little bit of practice in with this type of game. Though that is where it ends. Some pieces are interesting like using battle suits to fight in which give you a little more bang for your buck and be able to change your loadouts at armory stations.
Story campaigns are the best things to have for an RTS title, however, this title has mostly PvP applications with an offline mode that entails different cities or areas to fight within. The only real story we receive is a cutscene that describes who the main factions of Eximius: Seize the Frontlines are. How war broke out because of splintering ideals and the lack of ability to work together. The complete lack of story kills any future playtime consideration for me. While I did have some fun playing this title the lack of certain aspects, which make other games great, completely kills it for me. There are a bunch of cool ideas, but I feel the team may have bitten off more than they could chew as this title was launched. More time could be spent on a proper story and some tweaking of their core systems. Expanding on the factions would be another great thing to work on to explain a little bit more about what happened.
Overall, Eximius: Seize the Frontlines suffers from being a bit too ambitious with its concept even though I like the concept a lot. Lack of story and some need for balance is what pulls it down for me. There is a lack of explanation of how the factions work and what their main goals are beyond a cutscene. It sits at $29.99 but I don’t think I would recommend this title to anyone for that price. There isn’t enough to keep you interested in it beyond the cool hybrid RTS to FPS system that they created.
Note: Our copy was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by PR.
