Victory Game Center

Pylon_Trooper wrote: Incidental thing...strike fighter getting tagged by enemy AA. Fuselage detonates and fragments after missile hit, fighter breaks apart, but the inertia carries the flaming shards for kilometres before clipping the top of dunes, throwing up plumes of dust and fire.

Wonderful attention to detail.

Rob Zacny wrote: The missions themselves leave a bit to be desired in terms of pacing. I was always left alone while my salvagers picked the map clean of resources, which made of a lot of dull waiting around, but the persistent units and resources in the campaign encourages exactly this kind of cautious, risk averse play. After a game like Legacy of the Void, where there's always some new crisis to deal with, the missions in Deserts of Kharak seemed a bit too passive, waiting for me to trigger the next event rather than creating a sense of urgency.

Alec Meer wrote: The stand-out element, however, is the sound design. Over long years, we’ve miserably adjusted to the idea that all you can do with unit chatter is have each guy say something funny or militaryesque when you click on them, but Kharak casually rewrites the rules. Either by selecting units or by just hanging around and listening, you’ll hear the units talk amongst themselves. Select a unit and while sometimes they’ll just give an ‘acknowledged’, other times a more involved, context-sensitive reaction to whatever you’ve ordered them to do. An endangered unit might thank you for sending in air support. A ship which has spotted incoming enemies will tell you what type of craft they are. Idle units will chatter amongst themselves at length about faults and tactics.

As well as successfully giving you a general sense of what’s going via audio alone, it sounds natural and responsive, rather than mechanical and repetitive – all adding to that sense that this is a large and well-oiled military machine, not just some cute little guys who popped out of a magic factory. Kharak might not otherwise be a landmark moment for the genre, but its unit audio does set new standards. It’s going to be so disappointing to play a strategy game filled with tinned quips after this.