Meba Wars Preview

This is real grass-roots game design. A simple yet inventive concept that manages to present a more interesting ‘modern’ idea than can be mustered by most new-gen console titles. Meba Wars is a real-time strategy game, and that’s probably one of the most accurate genre labels you’ll ever encounter. The whole experience is ongoing, so you could join a game halfway through and make a big enough impact to win, or pop in and out of a longer game during breaks. That persistent game environment in which players have free reign is truly unique for an RTS, and is arguably the most interesting element of Meba Wars. That’s not to say the rest isn’t just as intriguing though.

The core gameplay of Meba Wars is very simple. You begin a game with one little meba, essentially a micro-organism that looks like a splodge of paint. You need to guide that meba towards stashes of candy from which the organism can multiply, usually into a couple of extra identical creatures. Other than candy, the game’s secondary resource is metal, used to upgrade (or morph) your mebas into a host of varying forms all based around either attack, defence or spawning even smaller creatures. You then use your morphed mebas and and their underlings (not an official title, that) to destroy other player’s micro-armies and slowly chip away at a central AI base.

 What makes games more than repetitive matches of ‘hunt down the resources’ is the surprisingly varied customisation options brought about through the morphing mechanic. When you upgrade a meba you have three categories to choose from: weapon, chassis and secondary device. Each of these categories provides a host of options, ranging from giant catapults to mechanised spider legs. They all provide their own strengths and weaknesses and each provide a new element of strategy. Even in the game’s current alpha state players have started to rely on tried and tested methods of execution as with any other RTS game. Meba Wars may not have the technical grunt of games like Company of Heroes 2, but it relies on the same core principles. In this basic form, they’re far more obvious and arguably even more fun to play around with.

As mentioned, the main idea of the game is to mess up the plans of your fellow meba overlords. Currently, it can be a little tricky to take on some players as the lack of any ranking system means you could be trying to attack someone with much more experience than you. It’s a situation that makes you realise just how useful matchmaking in RTS games is. That jump in-jump out mechanic, however, helps to relieve the stress of playing for the first time. Where in most games you have to swallow your pride and accept defeat as you learn, Meba Wars lets the player learn in small chunks and, crucially, back out of a battle freely if things get a little too tricky. You can even get a preview of what certain battles look like before joining, making it even easier to choose a good game. 

In many ways, a lot of this praise is theoretical as Meba Wars is more than a little rough around the edges at time of writing. That’s totally understandable though, and it’s a testament to the original idea that there’s a lot to be interested in at this point in development. Playing Meba Wars right now isn’t perhaps the best way to properly introduce yourself to the game, but it is the only way to support the developer. After a sadly failed kickstarter campaign it’s good to see that production on the game hasn’t ceased and while the game currently functions in a web browser, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the title on Steam Greenlight very soon. That, at least, would be my recommendation. RTS has become something of a stagnant genre and while Meba Wars isn’t exactly a revolution, it has some neat ideas.

Of course, you can view the ‘play while in development’ style with classically skeptical eyes if you want, but it’s important to note that the game is constantly evolving and seemingly improving. Even as this piece is written the developer has patched the game to include a new game mode in which there is no central base to fight over or team up on, but rather opponents just battle across a not-empty-for-long plain. Close connection with the dev’s creation process is always a key reason to get involved with something like this, and Meba Wars is certainly one of the smaller projects we’ve seen in a while. It’ll be great to see if the one man design team can turn this into something that strategy fans will want to play. For now it’s a rough, albeit fun and functional, game with a strong core foundation.

You can try Meba Wars on the official website.