Eximius: Seize the Frontline
Ammobox Studios
Two of the most popular genres of games that play out in real-time are real-time strategy games (duh) and first-person shooters. While fans of both of these venerated genres have had untold amounts of popular titles to choose from throughout the decades, not too many game developers have attempted to blend them both together. Well, after over two years in Early Access hell and some issues with a previous game publisher, indie developers, Ammobox Studios, is attempting such a rare feat.
Their little digital baby is called Eximius: Seize the Frontline and it does indeed attempt to blend the two storied genres. You’ll be thrust into five vs. five battles where each team consists of four officers and one commander. While the commander can oversee things from a classic, top-down RTS vantage point, each of his officers sees things from first-person shooter views.
There are two factions to choose from so far—the Global Security Force AKA GSF, that plays like a more traditional good guy military faction trying to save the world, and the dastardly Axeron, who employ high-tech cybernetics in their bid to take over the world. As you can probably tell, the two sides are polar opposites.
As the officers zip around the small-ish urban maps, the commander will move the AI soldiers around. And herein lies one of the first issues I noticed with Eximius: Seize the Frontline—the game’s movement. Simply put, the movement of your units looks and feels clunky and stiff, almost as if they were robotic dolls being jerked around on marionette strings.
Another thing that seems way off is the way that, while the first-person shooter controlled soldiers usually move from cover-to-cover (albeit in the herky-jerky manners), the AI ones move around in swarm-like groups. Now while this massed movement may be acceptable in many of the squad-based RTS titles you find out on the market, it looks super-janky here.
When the AI-controlled soldiers aren’t being moved somewhere by the commander, they stand still like mannequins in odd formations (if you can call them that). At least in any respectable RTS, your units kneel, move around a bit, take cover behind any nearby objects, etc. Not so here—talk about a lack of immersion.
The battles in Eximius: Seize the Frontline are a mixed bag. I didn’t notice that any AI soldiers ever took cover while engaged in skirmishes, they either tend to just kind of stand out in the street and exchange fire with enemies or move back and forth in said streets.
However, to the game’s credit, the visual effects all look pretty darn good. Lasers flash down avenues and have bright, colorful impacts with whatever they happen to hit. Large explosions and defensive shields also look really impressive and you can tell that this is a near-future conflict.
Despite these cool visuals, the poor unit pathing often results in units getting stuck on objects or moving where you don’t want them to. This can result in them being obliterated, not because of your orders, but because of the game’s poor controls. The game’s small maps don’t help this issue at all.
While I think that Eximius: Seize the Frontline has a cool concept and some great ideas, the execution is rather lackluster, which sadly has created some disappointing results. I hope that the developers work on fixing some of these glaring problems, but until then I’ll be playing other games.
RATING: 6.1/10
Eximius has some amazing graphics so you’ll need a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. Therefore, you may just want to invest in a superior gaming rig:
Visit CyberpowerPC’s website to check out all of the other great deals as well!