Enlarge / Boy, the flying units in Brass Tactics sure are pesky—and that’s the point.
BELLEVUE, Washington—Virtual reality has been a thing for years, yet for some reason, it has had a lack of real-time strategy (RTS) games. To this, I can’t help but say, what gives? Managing a giant army à la StarCraft seems like a nice fit for VR’s mix of hand-tracked controllers and first-person twists—while also minding VR’s limits. Stand above a battlefield (or, if your room is cramped, sit without losing the effect). Use your hands to become a war puppeteer. Enjoy a refreshing control and perspective alternative to ancient, mouse-driven menus.
It’s a VR no-brainer… that nobody has truly attempted until this week.
Unlike other RTS-ish games in VR, this week’s Brass Tactics is the first full-blown take on the genre to see a retail release. It’s not perfect—indeed, it has a couple of glaring issues ahead of its Thursday launch—but Brass Tactics is clearly a few steps above “just good enough.” It functions as a pure, solid RTS, while it also comes packed with nice VR touches. Best of all, thanks to a free, unlimited, works-online demo version, every single VR owner out there (even outside the Oculus ecosystem) can try it for themselves—and try it they should.
Clear RTS skies
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By turning your wrist, you can reveal a tower “bookshelf.” Grab little toy towers off of this to slot them into open spots on the battlefield (so long as you have built up enough “gems” to pay for the tower, which you accumulate by taking over gem- and gold-producing territories).
To explain how Brass Tactics works, it’s best to start with what the game doesn’t reinvent: the RTS wheel.
As an overseeing commander in medieval combat, your objective is to manage troops and economies while trying to win a one-on-one war skirmish. The setup almost sounds copied-and-pasted from a ’90s classic in the genre: each player starts at a corner of a map. Create and direct wimpy troops to march toward your opponent (or occasionally to various edges of the map) while capturing points that you can use to accumulate resources and build new troops. Grow your army. Create more powerful units and spend resources on updating your existing ones. Contend with a crisscrossing rock-paper-scissors system of combat (archer beats warrior, warrior beats cavalry, cavalry beats archer, etc.) to ultimately destroy your opponent’s base.
With those basic building blocks established, Brass Tactics flexes its risk-taking muscles almost exclusively around its VR perspective. For starters: there’s no fog of war. Unlike classics like StarCraft, in which you have to create and direct troops to “light up” unseen parts of the map, Brass’ commanders can instead freely look and wander around a battle arena to see everything at all times. To move around the battlefield, grab and fling the table around, using a comfortable-yet-quick “sliding” mechanic.
As early as the first seconds of a match, you can do this to waltz right up to your opponent’s base, if not his or her VR avatar. Or even wave hi from afar. (I did this a lot in testing.) This starts out feeling awkward—like, really? You’re gonna let me see everything my opponent is up to at all times? But Hidden Path cofounder Jeff Pobst tells Ars Technica that he thinks an in-the-battle VR perspective offers something different and organic: a “fog of attention.”
I quote him not to give him a free sales pitch but to say that he’s on to something. My time playing Brass Tactics, particularly across the retail version’s variety of branching-path tactical options, was always tempered by a relatively limited perspective from wherever I stood in the VR space. Importantly, players cannot “pinch” in this VR space to make the world grow or shrink. Players are stuck at a fixed perspective, and they’ll need to rapidly slide to and from bases and units to tap, activate, and direct them, anyway. I found myself within my own fog of war enough as it was. (Hidden Path probably appreciates the slightly narrow field-of-view within VR headsets at this point.)
Hidden Path had actually planned to launch an RTS without fog of war for some time, confirming to Ars that the twist had been tested in two unreleased RTS games. Hidden Path had been wanting to return to the RTS games it had loved in the past—like what company cofounder Marc Terrano had worked on in Age of Empires’ earliest days—but knew that hour-long matches weren’t going to cut it for modern players’ and streamers’ attention spans. Pobst describes that shift as “a scary thing” for RTS traditionalists, but his team had long believed that dumping fog-of-war could work in terms of decreasing match length without reducing pure RTS complexity.
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I press Pobst on his mention of streaming, asking if sites like Twitch played any part in that design decision. He minces no words: “Yeah, actually! But it wasn’t a design pillar. This is just a great way for people to see what fun can be had inside of VR.”
He then points to the game’s surprise appearance at PAX South 2017, which shows two competitors in the expo’s “Omegathon” contest facing off. It’s quite watchable, thanks to Hidden Path’s broadcasting toolset and the game’s easily seen floating VR avatars managing their armies—not to mention a crisp 12-minute runtime from start to “gg.”
From there, the game really is more about easing players into a hand-controlled RTS control suite. Every major, cool thing about Brass Tactics is subtle. An example: when you take over an empty base, you might want to slap a cavalry tower into its slot so you can start producing horse-riding warriors on the left side of the map. To do so, flip one of your wrists over to reveal a small, wooden shelf of roughly eight tower options, then use your other hand to grab the tower you want and stick it into the slot.
Utilizing an RTS-styled “tech tree” works in a similar fashion. To access it, you must slide all the way back to your base, which sits at the end of a giant, wooden table. At that point, a drawer will slide out, full of boost options. Pick the one you want, labeled with clear text, and slap it into your castle to buy and activate it.
But perhaps coolest of all is the incredible ease with which you can pick, activate, and aim your individual army units. When your hand is near a unit you want to command, hold down your controller’s trigger button, then aim your hand so that the direction of your index finger is where you want your unit to go. Hidden Path tells Ars that it worked for quite some time on fine-tuning this “move units in the direction of your forearm” control system, and there’s really no way to describe it that sells just how bloody elegant it is in practice. (The devs had worked on control systems such as a direct laser pointer; this kind of thing works in other games, they say, but in 20- to 25-minute Brass Tactics battles, players reported wrist fatigue.)
Additionally, you can grab and direct a single unit by half-squeezing the trigger, or you can grab and direct a whole gang of units at once by full-squeezing the trigger while gliding your hand over every unit you want to move. This also feels quite slick in practice, but it exposes one Brassletdown. Testers have already begun begging for one more option: a way to select all units of a certain type (like, grab every archer or tank on the battlefield at once). Hidden Path tells fans it’s working on it, but that’s the kind of classic-RTS option I would have expected on day one. (With that in mind, I doubt that they’ll go so far as to let players create custom selectable unit groups, but hey, who knows?)
Smart tweaks, worrying issues
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Enlarge / The combat looks the same in Brass Tactics: Arena as it does in the paid version. You just get a lot more stuff if you pay.
Hidden Path says it spent roughly eight months of full development manpower on the game’s comfortable control system and presentation, and I hope someday they publish prototype footage of its experiments and failures.
Instead of a square table, one of the earliest versions of the game put players in control of a rotating tray (informally, a Lazy Susan) that they had to manually spin to get around the battlefield. This restricted access to the center of the table and forced the team to shrink the board, however. This was more comfortable, by the way, than another experiment of wrapping a full battle map on a “barrel” shape that players could manually rotate, which was an offspring of a globe-like, sphere-spinning experiment.
Ultimately, the giant wooden board-gaming table concept won out, especially when the developers realized that players didn’t actually mind having the board seemingly pass through their bodies. (If Brass Tactics worked in real life, you’d have to cut your body open at your sternum.)
From there, the rest of the package seems solid and thought-out enough—though, admittedly, in a first-blush way that could crumble as more players pile on. Out of 12 unit types, players can bring eight of them into a battle (and then need to install towers for each type as a battle rages). You can only bring three of the game’s four basic unit types into a given battle; four out of six advanced unit types; and one of the two epic unit types. The variety borrows from stuff you’ve seen in older games, with certain unit types existing mostly to boost others or to enable advanced maneuvers—and tech trees afford some serious divergence options for each. From what I’ve played thus far, every unit has basic checks and balances among other units, and even if your buildout is lacking in a certain unit type, the tech trees offer a good amount of wiggle room.
Skirmish modes have been my favorite in the game, as they’ve let me go crazy with Hidden Path’s VRTS sandbox and play around with unit types ahead of the game’s full launch. There has been online access in the game’s early stretches, meanwhile, thanks to a free product called Brass Tactics: Arena (see the sidebar for more on that). If you’re a retail owner of Brass Tactics in need of a multiplayer partner, at the very least, you’ll have access to the free player base, as opposed to walking into a low-population VR graveyard.
However, I’ve yet to complete a single online BT:A match thanks either to unexplained disconnections or outright game crashes. (This also happened with the promising co-op skirmish mode, which challenges two friends or strangers to team up against overpowered AI opponents. I hope to sink my teeth into more of this promising co-op mode in the near future.) Enough players have reported solid-enough network performance in BT:A to prove it’s not a total disaster, but other users posted similar complaints during my review period, and Hidden Path has issued assurances of fixes to come, so something is certainly up.
Meanwhile, the game’s eight-mission campaign starts off promising, with organic opportunities to teach players how the game works. Unfortunately, it jacks up in difficulty so wildly that I haven’t beaten it as of press time. I’ve repeatedly run into issues on “normal” difficulty in which I’ve laser-focused my entire build operation on a single path, just to try to chip away at my computer opponent, only to watch the AI generate more units, and more diverse ones, than I possibly can. Something is wrong with the campaign’s tuning, and I had to tuck my tail between my legs and opt for “easy” just to get through enough to at least explore and enjoy the game’s unit variety and tech-tree options.
For those reasons, the otherwise impressive Brass Tactics doesn’t merit our “Ars Recommended” sticker at this time.
Kinect the dots?
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A quick walk through the incredibly modest studios at Hidden Path Entertainment.
Brass Tactics began life after Hidden Path picked up a contract to port its tower-defense series Defense Grid to Oculus for its 2016 launch lineup. That project’s success was enough for Oculus to ask Hidden Path, “if you could make any kind of game, what would you make?” Their answer: a bona-fide VRTS. Now, Pobst says his studio has become “mostly focused” on VR with a “great relationship” with Oculus.
Some might consider that VR pivot a stretch for a company that is best known for mouse-and-keyboard stalwart series like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Age of Empires II HD. Pobst points out that his company has been in the weird-peripheral biz a lot longer than fans might realize.
“Sometimes we’ve done consulting on crazy technologies. We made the very first Kinect demo for Microsoft, before it was called Natal,” Pobst tells Ars. “Some people had ideas of what they wanted it to do and asked us to come up with ideas. They showed [our demo] to management. A year later, it became a project.”
Hidden Path is one of the more intriguing fingers-in-every-pie developers in the Seattle area, as it turns out. I caught so many knowing looks and “please don’t print that” mutterings in our conversation that I have to wonder whether its collection of NDAs could cover the Great Wall of China. This is likely due to the company’s formation in 2006 as a gang of ex-Microsoft consultants who had worked on developer relations during the Xbox and early Xbox 360 eras—and who had all been hired by Microsoft from other PC game development studios. Pobst, for example, sharpened his game-dev claws as a programmer on the original King’s Quest series before becoming a Sierra Games producer for series such as Half-Life. (Which might explain the company’s cozy, Counter-Strike-related relationship with Valve to this day.)
Hope for a Brass ring
With that in mind, Brass Tactics reveals a company in an interesting position: committed to VR (and apparently the Oculus ecosystem, complete with tons of support from its experimental research divisions) but still ultimately subject to a publisher’s whims. An example: when I ask about the game’s 1v1 focus and whether that could expand to 2v2—something that could be more watchable, especially in an era in which team games like Dota 2 and League of Legendsdominate e-sports attention—the answer circles back to having to “talk to” Oculus about expanding support for the game (since Oculus is publishing Brass Tactics). Pobst suggests “taking care of people, giving them more options to play, I think those are very Oculus things.”
Meaning, we really do have to wait and see how well a game like Brass Tactics is supported, as players explore its meta, balance issues, and strategies. As mentioned above, it doesn’t ship as a perfect RTS. Hidden Path and Oculus appear to be committed to the game in its launch period, at least, which means we’re hopeful for fixes to connectivity, crash, and campaign issues in the near future. What about months down the line, however? The story probably boils down to whether the meaty free version inspires VR players—especially those sickened by constant microtransaction nags in other games—to pay up for the full Brass Tactics at $40.
Since I can’t predict the future, I will opine based on what I’ve played thus far. Brass Tactics’ strides in comfort and accessibility do not dumb down the core intensity of a good RTS experience. I can whip around a giant battlefield using my hands and Hidden Path’s control system to feel like a competent commander, if not a badass one. For this longtime RTS outsider—someone who always appreciated but was never good at the genre’s best—that quality alone is enough to nudge me into recommending a full-price purchase to anybody intrigued by the potential of VRTS.
And while we wait for patches, gosh, go grab the free version no matter what.
The good:
Every element of the RTS control experience, top to bottom, has been streamlined to work incredibly well in VR. This is a dream come true.
– Clean designs and cute visual flourishes make it easy to understand any combat moment at a glance.
– This isn’t a wheel-reinvention for RTS, but unit variety and tech-tree options are satisfying and feel like they’ve been built by true RTS pros.
– Free version isn’t just a tasty demo for the curious; it also keeps online player numbers high for those who pay.
The bad:
– At launch, campaign’s “normal” challenge is still in serious need of tweaking for average RTS players.
The ugly:
– We’re currently wondering whether online play will be up to snuff.
Verdict: All PC VR headset owners should grab the free version while waiting for the paid one to get its archers in a row.
Source: ars TECHNICA