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ORB wasn’t supposed to be a Homeworld clone. In fact, it was in development BEFORE Homeworld started it’s development phase. But the end result presented us with a game that was definitely related to Homeworld by more than just a genre. ORB is a sci-fi space, real time strategy game that centers on the conflict between two races: the Malus and the Alyssians. These races are duking it out to discover the secrets of an ancient alien race thought to hold the key to ultimate power in the universe.

If you’ve played Homeworld, you’ll easily catch on to the idea behind ORB. The ultimate goal is to gather resources, research technology, build an army of ships and destroy your enemy. In the single player campaign, you can play through the storyline as either the Malus or the Alyssians. Most of the missions entail wiping the other race from the face of the map. You’ll need to find resource mines (special asteroids) and gather materials to build your fleet of fighters and capital ships. The screwy thing is, most missions/maps only have two, or three resource asteroids. You’ll have one near you, one near the enemy, and sometimes a third elsewhere. After your recon vessel finds the resource asteroid nearest your base, you may was well take that ship back to your star base and scrap it because it becomes next to useless at that point. If you want, you can have it automatically roam around the map, scanning asteroids with it’s cool scanning effect. Hey, it looks and sounds cool at least. After you find your resource asteroid, you’ll need to start extracting its buried goodies. You’ll bring your mining ship up to the asteroid and establish a resource route between it and your star base (it sounds more complicated than it really is). After your resource mining is in full swing, you can start to build your fleet of ships.

The technology tree is simple compared to other Strategy First games (such as GalCiv). You will research alloys, weapons, sensors and a few other pertinent technologies to improve your ships and their capabilities. Once you have completed enough research in a few particular categories, new ships will open up: more advanced fighters and eventually huge capital ships with massive beam weapons that tear through enemy ships like they were already a floating hunk of space junk. You won’t be able to upgrade your current ships, which is a disappointment. Fortunately you’ll usually have enough time to build a small fleet of fighters to tide you over until you can finish researching everything else and start building your real fleet of high-tech ships. There’s also a new twist to limiting the size of your fleet. Instead of having an generic hard cap, you have a certain amount of ‘manpower’, which must be allocated between your ships, resources and research. If you want to research faster, then you can allocate more manpower to research, but you’ll suffer elsewhere. If you want to queue up a large number of ships in the build queue, make sure you have the necessary pilots (part of your manpower rating) to fly them. You can grow your manpower by researching different technology and expanding your star bases.

You should find the interface familiar to most other RTS games. You have your basic unit groups, formations and intuitive mouse controls. The thing that sets apart ORB from most other RTS games is the fancy 2D (which is now partially 3D as of the latest patch) tactical map view. You manage the entire map from this point of view. You’re given the whole scope of the map and you’re able to issue the same orders in this view as you are in the normal 3D interface. The downside is missing out on all the pretty graphics and ship-to-ship combat that takes place in the normal 3D interface. I found myself torn between the two interfaces. While the normal 3D interface was easy to use once you spent a few minutes learning it, the tactical interface was simply a much better method of managing your units. This is a classic example of the delicious cake sitting in front of you, but being on that damn Atkins diet. Eventually I settled on running most of my games from the tactical map, then going back to the 3D interface when combat occurred. The single player campaigns usually run slow enough to make this a plausible solution. In multiplayer, against multiple opponents, this could be just the distraction your enemy hopes for as he sneaks around your perimeter and launches his attack while you’re glued to the ship-to-ship battles with someone else. You’ll have to find what works best for your own tastes, I suppose.

The graphics of ORB are amazingly strong, considering it’s not something Strategy First has been known for in the past. You can tell a lot of care was put into the models and especially the cut scenes, some of which are treacherously breathtaking. Ambient sound effects consist of your units responding to you in their specific language, which seems neat at first, but grows tiresome; eventually to the point where you’d wish they’d just shut the hell up and do what you order without robotically barking back at you every time you boss them around. The musical score, especially during combat, is great. It does a fabulous job at setting the mood of the game and sounds very nice.

The game runs well on a lower end PC. There are also several patches that have been released that change the game substantially. Patching was a pain in the ass though, because the patch wants to install to a bogus directory name by default. It appends a funky name to the end of your game directory and if you let it use that directory name, it hoses your install. You need to make sure you remove the garbage it puts in by default and tell it to patch straight to your games root directory.

When it comes down to it, ORB has a solid foundation for some great multiplayer action, but lacks any sort of original story (it’s a basic, cliché sci-fi plot) in single player mode. The graphics and the interface are both stunning and stylish. It’s worth a look if you’re a fan of the sci-fi RTS genre. There’s a playable demo out for download. I recommend giving that a go.