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Total Annihilation!  For any Real Time Strategy (R.T.S.) fan, this is a must play.  Along with Warcraft and StarCraft, Total Annihilation helped form the RTS genre into what it is today.  With great music, great narration and a giant list of units to build or destroy, its easy to see why some people still play this game today.
OK, now before I even begin to talk about this game, watch this intro.



Total Annihilation was released in 1997 by Cavedog and received great praise across the gaming world.  Earning more than 50 awards T.A. was easily game of the year. I had to ask a buddy of mine to dig out his copy of this game so I could play it again after more than 10 years.  Dusting it off, I realized I had a piece of my teenage years in my hands.  I spent countless hours playing this game and marveling at how great it looked.  The intro alone is enough to make you want to start a war of epic proportions!

The game starts out with two opposing factions, the Arm and the Core.  Both have their own story containing 25 missions each.  Before any level is played you will receive a briefing and a short narration by John Patrick Lowrie, who oddly enough sounds like James Earl Jones.  When using the Core you get the hilarious message at the end of every briefing "DO SO NOW".  The first missions start you off on your respective faction's home world (Empyrrean for the Arm and Core Prime for the Core). After fighting your way through each of the 25 battles, slowly making your way across the galaxy, you end up on your enemy's home turf for the climatic showdown.  The only downside is that the story isn't fleshed out enough but this doesn't take away from the overall experience too much.

Easily one of the best aspects of this game is the music.  After some digging, I found out that the great Jeremy Soule and a 96 piece orchestra provided the soundtrack.  As you play the game the music will change depending on your actions.  When you are building or repairing a slower paced, almost creepy in a way, theme will play.  During a battle the music really picks up and you feel as if you're really there controlling the movements of your troops.  Music is a long lost art is video games these days.

Complimenting this great set of music is an excellent physics engine.  Shells from weapons have trajectory that will be altered depending on the gravity of the planet or moon you are fighting on.  The game is strictly top down 2D but hills and certain elevated areas of a map have "height values".  This makes the 2D plain seem 3D as units can use these hills to hide from fire or give them better range when on top.  Nothing beats placing a long range gun on top of a hill to hit the enemy for across the map.

Along the way you learn how to combine units to form destructive armies, gather resources and how to build massive bases..  Prior to T.A. no previous RTS had allowed for such massive amounts of combat units to be used.  When it was first released up to 200 units could be used.  Later, following patches allowed players to use 500 and then 1,000 units.  Trust me, when you see 1,000 robots shooting at another 1,000 robots, its pretty damn cool.  One of the things I most enjoyed about building in T.A. was the ability to queue up multiple commands.  These command queues leads to less micro-managing of single units.

In order to build these Go-Bots of destruction, you must first gather resources.  These come in two forms, metal and energy.  Both when harvested are infinite, unlike games such as Starcraft, which have obvious finite resources on maps.  This allowed players to focus on building combat units, bases and defenses, in other words, getting to the sweet nugat center rather quickly.  Finding metal deposits and keeping them safe however, was a daunting task but made the game interesting and more strategic.  

When started off on any map, whether its single player or multiplayer, you begin with a Commander unit.  Should your Commander die, you lose, but get to see a sweet explosion that takes out anything around it. Sometimes this explosion makes the screen go black and white depending on whether that was the end objective.  Fairly simple, but killing a Commander was easy only in theory.  They had a decent amount of health and a special weapon called a D-Gun that could destroy any unit in one shot. While powerful this D-Gun took a chunk of energy to use.  Keeping your Commander safe was paramount, but using him also meant faster building and faster repairs.

Eventually each Commander, after setting up his resource gathering, could build factories. Each one could pump out near limitless units, the more factories the better.  Each unit had its on specialty, such as anti air or underwater fighting.  Units were divided into 3 categories, 'Kbots' and vehicles (walking/driving ground based units) Aircraft (flying units) and Water units (boats, ships and submarines).  Different combinations of units are needed to provide a well rounded offense or defense.  Leaving without anti-air Kbots could lead to a wasted army against bombers.  Should any of these units achieve 5 kills they will get an increase in damage and health.  Keeping your veteran units around made armies of even simple units devastating as the effect stacked every other 5 kills.

Now after beating the game on both sides, what's left?  Well you can either do a skirmish match against the CPU, who I swear builds faster than you do but provides a great challenge.  But the best way to continue the life of the game was through the multiplayer.  Sadly, since Cavedog no longer exists the multiplayer is no longer supported.  I do remember back during my middle school days of all the odd and wacky strategies that people would use.  Pee-Wee rushes, nothing but air units and one my friends and I created, grabbing the enemy Commander with a flying transport unit so his own men err robots would kill him.

Later on an expansion was released called the "Core Contingency".  This expansion picked up after the Arm campaign, sorry Core players looks like they won.  It introduced another 25 missions and added 75 new units to the 150 provided in T.A. vanilla.  Not long after that T.A. Battle Tactics was released.  I never had a chance to play this expansion or if i did I don't remember it.  According to wikipedia it added "another 4 units and 100 extra missions"...wow!  Of course, Cavedog provided additional downloadable units and maps for free, which were very unique and fun to play with.  The Krogoth from the CC expansion and its mission the Krogoth encounter.which was only playable on hard mode are truly memorable and frightening.  "Damn thing looks cute on its picture until you see it spewing missiles into your Commander's face!" - Me after playing the Krogoth encounter again.

This game has lived on for a very long time. Even after all that time that past I was still in disbelief that it had been released in the 90's.  If I didn't have to give this game back I would keep it.  Any fan of RTS games or killer robots should play this piece of gaming history.  Long live the Core and Arm!  Stick around for my review of T.A's spiritual successor, Supreme Commander. DO SO NOW!
4.5/5