Pulsar

Overview

Pulsar is a new game being developed for the computer, available on Mac and PC, that combines real-time strategy gameplay with base building and resource management. At the moment, the game is only available as a tutorial/demo, but even in its current state, Pulsar offers an engaging and challenging gameplay experience.

Gameplay

As a player, you'll need to build and manage your own base, gather resources, and fend off hordes of alien enemies.  The tutorial walks you through the gameplay using sequential quests. Crafting collectors to gather the resources that fund all building/crafting, creating the buildings required in your supply chain, and finally through the various steps to crafting your only military unit. Once completed your new units head out to tackle the alien nest.

Currently, Pulsar only has a limited number of buildings and units at your disposal. So the supply chains and base building lack options and are completed without much thought. You also get a single type of combat unit, so it is really lacking variety.

The menus can take a little getting used to, however, Pulsar does offer standard shortcut controls, including waypoints, to help you quickly and efficiently manage your units. The unit control is also implemented in a way that allows you to micro-manage units, this means you can kite your enemies by timing movement correctly with their attack animation. However, one issue I noticed is that leveling up units can be easily overlooked, so it's essential to keep an eye on your troops' progress. Whilst I assume leveling up was a good thing, it wasn’t obvious what it did and I didn’t go looking to find out.

Graphics-wise, Pulsar looks good, and the animations and unit graphics are detailed and distinct, allowing you to quickly identify units. The camera handles moving around the map smoothly, but the game could benefit from the ability to zoom out further to get a better view of the battlefield. Right now it feels like your face is squashed against some of the larger buildings and units.

Review

During the short tutorial Pulsar has to offer at the time of writing, you do get snippets of lore, which promises more depth to the game when fully released. All in all, Pulsar shows potential to be a solid RTS strategy game that's definitely worth checking out. We're excited to see what the full release has in store for us.