BOID Review

It’s not very often that real-time strategy gets a revamp in indie form, and it’s even rarer when the finished product turns out to be competent and well thought out. With that pessimism-charged opening sentence I’d like to introduce BOID (Bio Organic Infestation Drone), from developers Mokus. The game centres around a peaceful humanity sending immense ships filled with drones out into the stars to terraform planets for habitation, only something has gone wrong with the distant earth-like Kepler 42-C, where your character, a lonely worker of an orbital space station, has to control primitive genetic life forms to take control of an immense underwater landscape.

Interestingly, you’ll only learn more about the game if you purchase its single-player DLC campaign, which even then is simply maps from the multiplayer wrapped around a story. BOID arrives as a multiplayer game at heart, and challenges players to take over their opponents spawning zone. It’s this free-to-play side of the game that makes it stand out as a unique RTS game in its own right. Instead of being able to build bases, construct pylons or recruit troops, you are provided with spawners that generate drones. These little sparkly beings of primordial life can be sent to capture other spawners around the map, including ones that with transform them into a different class adapted to specific tasks like ranged combat or defence.

The goal is simply to destroy the enemy completely or control all of the points on the map, though the two objectives are rarely mutually exclusive. Each player can control up to eight varieties of drone-troop, adding a layer of tactical choice to any battle. With all things considered, BOID is essentially a MOBA-lite kind of game - managing your troop output as well as their direction of travel and spawning locations is key to victory. When some maps include as many as ten spawners for you to control a fair amount of micromanagement comes into it, and the task is much easier said than done. Mokus has also introduced some intriguing and thoughtful level design into the mix, too, offering competing layers cul-de-sacs, dead-ends and bottlenecks with which to trap, outwit and defeat their opponents.

Graphically, BOID won’t blow any minds, yet there is something of an ambience to the watery effects and the way that your troops glow with a warm neon light. This also works wonders in helping the player pick out what’s going on when two gangs of drones collide in battle. Each class has a quite distinctive silhouette, making it relatively easy to pick out what class is going where and what your opponent is deploying.

Musically the game never really expands from a low-key, ambient background score that serves to underpin your strategic movements. Though there could perhaps be a lot more tension added to it, the music at least is never outright distracting or overwhelming, leaving the player to concentrate of the most important parts of the game.

BOID is a strategy game that is bare-bones in terms of content, but what it has is exceptionally well-polished. From the mechanics to the level design to the meta strategy involved, this title is one that multiplayer strategy fans should put a few hours into, even if only because it’s free-to-play.