I just finally got into this game and I’m completely shell shocked! I had seen it recommended before but ventured into other games without giving it a fair shake. As an avid RTS fan since Dune: The battle for Arrakis on Sega genesis, I’ve been slowly feeling more and more lackluster in the genres future prospects. I was a huge Blizzard fan and when Starcraft dropped I was completely thrilled that the development started to veer away from the Warcraft style into larger armies. I was a fan of Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, and others with similar style but it just felt…off, maybe clunky is a better term to use (even though westwood studios was the same company that produce Dune to begin with).
I was worried with SC2’s lean on commanders and “special” units during campaigns but was glad multiplayer stayed a little less “MOBA”. I was especially excited for Stormgate but it honestly looks more WC3 than SC and I was let down from my own expectations (we really need to have industry defined sub-genres at this point so advertising is better).
Then last weekend I finally downloaded BAR after I missed all of the Steam winter sales and wanted something new to play. I’m completely blown away from what this game has accomplished and where it’s going. This feels like the first RTS game I’ve played that was made by real RTS players.
There’s so much functionality and cohesion going on I don’t know where to begin or how to describe it. You know every game that you play where you have to download copious amounts of mods for quality of life or gameplay improvements? They just bake it right into the game. Ever just want to sit back and watch a huge 25 v 25 battle with 10k units on the board? Literally jump into any lobby you want and watch the chaos commence (8v8 is the most popular that I’ve seen atm). This entire week I’ve had my “BAR TV” setup where it literally non-stop plays matches in spectator mode (lobbies stay up where new players filter in and out so it will never stop unless you log out, awesome system).
There’s so much I have to learn. I was Diamond League in SC2 and on BAR I’m getting completely torn to shreds by the easiest AI difficulty. It’s such a different mindset you need with this game, the hardest opponent is yourself and keeping your head in the game. I’ve watched games where a team is up 30% in resource production over the enemy team but it all comes down to your moral. There’s so much potential for proper strategies and there’s no concrete “winning” path, it’s all about your tactics and ingenuity. With a team game it’s about support and functioning cohesively like an actual real battle.
I haven’t felt this excited about gaming in a long time and I can’t wait to see where this game goes, I’ve already started spreadsheets for comparisons and making build orders with counter plays. I think I’ve found my home for the foreseeable future and I’m definitely satisfied. For anyone interested I’ll link some good videos and content creators I’ve stumbled onto, if you have recommendations I would love to hear them as I’ve only been watching a few casters so far.
TL;DR: BAR good, it’s free so go download it.
Videos as promised:
WinterStarcraft - The biggest RTS battle ever?! Total Annihilation inspired RTS - BAR (Winter also has his own voice overlay on the game, I thought “Winter” was just a character/theme and I laughed my ass off when I heard his voice come through while playing and having one of his videos on in the background)
Drongo - The Best Strait Spawn Is Actually Water - Beyond All Reason (BAR) (the game has water units like boats and hovercraft facilities with it’s own tech trees! I just really such at water atm)
FitzBro - Beyond All Reason Beginners Guide (BAR) (one of the first one’s I stumbled across looking for more guides, not sure if there are better ones out there yet.
WinterGaming - Nuclear Terraforming in Beyond All Reason! (Insane Game) (I wasn’t aware that you can actually terraform in the game till this video and it’s incredible.)
Also in about 10 hours the 2v2 pro tournament is about to start! If anyone’s interested I’ll post a link but I’m not sure where it’s officially done yet besides one older 1v1 tournament I watched the other day (not sure if it’s the same channel or if what I watched was the “official” upload).
Edit: The official 2v2 Pro Tournament just wrapped up! It’s located here. The juicy parts are near the end but kudos to the streaming team for keeping it going for 8 hours! I really enjoyed the bump in professionalism and the overall flow of the event compare to the previous event I watched, their constant improvements is what’s going to be keeping me hooked for a long time. Also I’ll include a link to the actual game download below as @gmr_leon@mstdn.social pointed out it was missing,
Spring engine based RTS games have been the best for a long time. I remember being similarly excited when I started playing Balanced Annihilation, which is the OG Spring based RTS, over ten years ago. BAR seems closely related to BA but has much more impressive looking graphics. Enjoy!
Yeah another big Spring Engine fan checking in here, the development of the Spring RTS engine and games on it has been a long road with lots of fun games played along it, mostly in Total Annihilation derivative games like BA, AA, XTA I forgot the other acronyms… and playing a TA-like game was what brought me like many others to playing games on the Spring Engine….
We wanted to play more RTS games like Total Annihilation but other than Supreme Commander FAF no game companies really seemed interested in doing anything but copying StarCraft (ughhh) or doing something totally different like Company Of Heroes. As a TA fan it felt like the RTS genre cut off its own head by treating StarCraft like it was this perfect RTS that demanded everyone copy it and I NEVER liked it. I liked TA with huge battles, the enormous amount of units with different roles not different gimmicks, the actual modeling of unit’s projectiles not some calculated MMO-like damage exchange, the fact that aircraft actually flew not just hovered, artillery had super long ranges like artillery should and battlefields could be as large and sprawling as my computer could handle.
I hadn’t checked in for awhile, but when I tried out BAR for the first time it got me really hyped again. BAR is so polished and well made and at this point just by virtue of being a TA-like Spring Engine mod there are years and years of tweaks, additions and subtractions to the TA formula that have been hammered out through thousands and thousands of games and many different mods with different ideas of what made TA good. The end result is a REALLY solid TA-like game that has the benefit of years of knowledge gleaned from tinkering with the formula of TA. This isn’t just a clone of TA, it is TA with 10+ years more of development work focused around gameplay balance and fun.
BAR is awesome! The AI got really good too at some point?