Battle Aces Preview - An RTS That Gets Straight to the Point

The tactical depth coupled with its epic scale makes the RTS genre unmatched in some ways, though it can sometimes feel way too intimidating or take too much time to get to the action. Battle Aces is here to solve that problem.

Battle Aces is RTS Made Easy, Not Simply

Battle Aces is an RTS that sees matches take place in just 10 minutes. That is likely a shockingly low number to RTS veterans, but that's part of the point. A game of Battle Aces is quick, on average lasting just five minutes according to the developer.

To get to that short match length, a lot of the RTS trappings have been stripped away. There is no base building to worry about, the tech upgrades are streamlined to just two paths, and you don't need to worry about managing workers.

Even things like expansion bases are automated. With the hit of a button, you'll slap down a new expansion base that will auto-generate workers to start getting resources going for you.

When you do that, your opponent knows you've expanded as well, so they can try to counter that themselves if they wish. What this often means is that you and your opponent are on relatively equal terms with resource generation, so it becomes who can use them better.

Of course, you can still send off a pack of units to kill some workers to interrupt their economy. If that happens to you, Battle Aces will take care or replacing workers for you.

That is just one of many examples where Battle Aces has the philosophy of taking care of anything that may distract you from the action of the game. Producing a sizeable army happens quickly, and then the game becomes all about using them to their maximum effectiveness.

Armies Grow Quickly and Clash Often

Unit production is near instantaneous, so losing group of units isn't immediately devastating -- though still a big deal. You can try to recover quickly enough by producing more units in a snap. On the flip side, it gives you the opportunity to defend yourself quickly if you're caught out.

One thing to remember about unit production, however, is that it is tied to the main, core base. Units are produced from that structure, so backing up an expansion a ways down the map will be a little more difficult.

Once I got back into the RTS swing, getting more comfortable with hotkeys and the muscle memory of moving a bunch of units around, I was completely enthralled by Battle Aces.

I didn't know this was something I wanted, but it scratched that itch of playing an RTS that I wanted every time I played but couldn't always accomplish. Competently building an effective army, and feeling like I had the ability to recover from mistakes, isn't easy in most RTS games.

Battle Aces helps take away that RTS anxiety I know a lot of people, myself included, have experienced. There was nothing more panic-inducing that waiting for a Starcraft II match to start. Will I make a mistake in the optimal build sequence, thus screwing me over? Will I look real dumb for doing things "incorrectly'?

Here, Battle Aces is all about the battles themselves. You build up an army and then strategize from there, whether that is through positioning something for flanks, getting around enemies to their base, or whatever scenarios you can dream up.

What's funner than seeing two massive armies duke it out, hundreds of units with bullets, missiles, and more flying through the air?

A large part of the strategy in Battle Aces is going to simply come from the unit composition, of course. There is a deck-like system where you select up to 8 units, which will form the pool of units you can use in a match.

At the start of a match, you can see what your opponent has so you can plan accordingly what tech upgrades or what units you want to use to counter theirs.

Learning a familiarity with those units, their abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and more will have huge factors on success in the game.

Not all units have abilities, but I saw some classics show up like one that hastened movement and attack speed, another that let units blink on the map. One interesting wrinkle to consider is that air units can shoot on the move -- all of them.

10 Minute Matches Ratchet the Tension

A final thing I want to circle back on is the 10 minute timer for matches. That 10 minutes is a hard cap, and some interesting things happen before the game ends.

First, at eight minutes all of the workers die at your main base and will not return. That means if you haven't expanded, or those bases have been destroyed, you're pretty screwed.

At nine minutes, a fighting game-like meter shows up at the top of the screen assigning a percentage "win" meter to each player. That gives the losing player one final minute to try to make up for lost ground.

The percentage of winning is determined by the efficiency of your resource gathering. Basically, the math is how many units you've lost versus resources used.

Battle Aces Preview | Final Thoughts

Battle Aces is one of those games that will reward you for just how much you put into it. It is simple to pick up and go, and those that really want to dig into the optimal army composition and learn how to adjust on the fly will find a lot to love here.

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Battle Aces was previewed at Summer Game Fest with about 45 minutes of gameplay.