Achron

I am happy to see I can buy two copies of this game for $19.99. I would not have purchased this game if my friend and I each had to pay $20 for it. Unfortunately, I cannot launch the game. Achron immediately says "Invalid Configuration. The Achron directory within the current user's home directory is corrupt or the home directory is unwritable.". All my Steam games work, so it seems more likely that there is an issue with Achron than that there is an issue with my write permissions.

I have requested a refund for this game. It looks like this game is no longer under development, and a bug like this will not be fixed.

It is true that some of the QoL of modern RTS are missing in achron but the time travel mechanic is fully fleshed out and have never played a more confuse and fun way to play rts. It is a shame that we don't have more games that playwith time as one of the mechanics, but this is a goldie. Getting confused only adds to the experience! Get it before you get out of time!

A rts with a short span time travel mechanic let down by awful execution in nearly every area. I was surprised it came with a tutorial but unfortunately what it wanted from me became a guessing game and I gave up. The simple unit designs and limited animations coupled with a nearly empty world environment and weird controls made it easy to decide to move on from.

The time travel mechanic is so good, but the gameplay suffers because the focus is on the gimmick mechanic. Fun to play sometimes if you're in the mood for time travel.

This game is pretty fun, even if I'm too terrible at RTS games to beat the tutorial. all of my issues come from my lack of skill not letting me get far enough to find the real issues. Maybe it would be easier for me to play a full game of diplomacy in an afternoon, but I might never know. So I will leave you with this fellow Achronals, I really wish that the official servers were still up. Only then would I be able to truly train for simpler games later on.

Time travel in this game isn't messing around. It's an actual fully-realized mechanic that works in multiplayer. The time wave system creates a nifty solution for a lot of paradox situations, allowing players to leverage those too.

Achron is, as other reviews put it, an incredible demo of the Resequence Engine, which is effectively a monstrosity of a database that allows a game to rebuild its world state at any point along a specified chunk of time for freeform time travel and manipulation of causality.

It is also, as other reviews put it, incredibly tiresome.

Having read a little of the developer's AMA on the subject, it's pretty clear the technology of 10 years ago left them with precious little headroom to design crucial elements of the RTS experience, such as unit pathfinding and awareness, which leaves the game feeling frustratingly unresponsive at the best of times.

Everything about the time travel system is incredibly well thought out and manages to be mostly intuitive after some time with the game, which is a feat in and of itself, but the commands, graphical design, and UI all remain very rough, as do the campaign scripting and map design.

More than once in the campaign I have quit out of frustration at the game just not doing anything I ask it to and expecting me to use time travel to reattempt jockeying my units around a cliff in time to avoid being slaughtered, one by one, by a comparatively smaller enemy force.

So, why am I recommending the game?

Well, it's because nothing like it has come in 10 years, and the engine is brimming with untapped potential. I think more people need to see this game for what it is and ask that either the developers use today's hardware to rethink and remaster it... or someone, Hazardous Software or otherwise, takes this engine and does it justice with a different game.

Hazardous Software has a few other products on offer, but they largely suffer from the same pattern of flaws: implementation in a very harsh resource environment with a bad sense of aesthetics and UI. They seem to have largely moved on to pitching the engine to corporations and military, because it's very, very good for intuitively visualizing emergent change in complex nonlinear systems.

If anyone sees this today, I ask that you give this game a look, give it a ton of patience, look past all the ugliness, and try to imagine what could be done with legitimate, solid, freeform time travel. I'd love to see something like XCOM done with Resequence.

Only play if you really want to try out the time travel mechanics, as that is the one things it does better than any other game out there. It has all of the fundamentals of a RTS game, but unit pathing and bad AI intelligence in non-scripted situations plague it. Worth a try on sale for the uniqueness, though.

I don't want to be too mean to this game; the time travel mechanics are well thought out, interesting, ingenious, and have emergent consequences with strategic implications.

That said, there is the MASSIVE issue that the game is basically unplayable, especially to a newcomer.

There's a lot of things that are just kind of broken with the game.
- The pathing is really bad; units that are ordered as a group to move will inevitable fan out into a giant line, even if it leaves them vulnerable.
- The interface is pretty confusing relative to the sheer complexity of the mechanics.
- Although theoretically the time travel takes the focus off of the whole RTS APM thing, in practice it doesn't seem much better; the literal pause doesn't actually stop the timewaves, or your opponent, from moving.
- The graphics are pretty bad, in a way that personally made it more difficult for me to play, and my library is largely filled with faux 8bit games.

But even aside from that, there is a major problem because here are 2 major modes: story, and PvP/multiplayer. Now, the first steps of the campaign are played with the human faction, which apparently back when the game was still being updated were actually kind of overpowered and were nerfed. This makes the first mission very difficult; you need to get lucky to succeed. The second mission is even worse; I'll admit I'm not amazing at the game, since I'm not a big RTS player, but it is near impossible unless you already fundamentally understand the game, before being introduced.

Of course, you could try the multiplayer. if you find someone who already plays to teach you, you might even learn the game.

(Writing this review made me saltier than I realized it would)

I love Achron as a concept, but I cannot possibly recommend it as a game. It has lots of flaws, and it has a learning curve that makes Dwarf Fortress look friendly and approachable.

If you are looking for a interesting experience this is your game, if you are looking for polish, not so much. It was difficult to maintain control and diferenciate units. It does have a good story, but the dificulty level curve and difficulty with the interface (not the time travel interface) made me take a long time to beet it as I had to take extended breaks from it.

A bad RTS, but a great demo of the Resequence Engine.

I really can't recommend this as an RTS, it just suffers from too many problems. Lack of visual clarity, bad pathfinding, dull textures, mediocre core gameplay...

Which is a real shame, as the central time-travel mechanic is amazing and almost single-handedly makes up for the rest of the game.

Considering the multiplayer community is now dead, I would only recommend picking this up if you have friends to mess around with or a masochistic longing for the campaign mode (which suffers pacing problems).

I'm sad I can't recommend this game. Although I love the main concept, it's shortcommings and extreme lack of polish end up beeing to much for me. I hope someone picks up this idea to try it again in the future.

The first time I played this I sat there for 6 hours working my way through the campaign. I stopped when I literally got a headache. But I was hooked.

It plays about as complex as you might expect a game with time travel to play. It manages it with a timeline you can view 5 minutes forward or back or anywhere in between. You click back 30sec and you change an order, then click back to the present and everything is the same. But then time waves come into it, they move slightly faster than the passage of time and wash over the timeline from start to finish and collect and propagate changes from the past to the future. So that change you made 30sec ago, you would see a wipe go over your screen in about 20sec and if it was a large difference in orders then things would change.

This opens up unique solutions to problems...
-Create 5 units, skip ahead in time 30 seconds to when they are finished and send them to a task. Skip back to the present and continue your base preperations.
-Attack fails on an enemy base? Go back in time and build more units to send. When the time wave propagates then you will see a successful attack.
-Theres a rock/paper/scissors weak against/strong against thing happening with units in this game. So if you find yourself being decimated then you can jsut go back and change the composition of units in a squad and sit back and enjoy victory.
-Enemy attacking you? You will see which direction they came from. Go back in time a minute, build more troops, and send troops in their direction to intercept. Your base is saved.

But your enemy also has access to this time manipulation also.
-Your troops find a large group of enemies and are outnumbered, go back in time and send more. You win. But with the next passing timewave you notice your troops sitting unharmed doing nothing. Your enemy went back in time and canceled the order to send the troops out so now you found nothing.
-You attack and destroy an enemy base. Your enemy goes back in time 1 minute before this happens and sends air units to destroy the factory that created the units that will destroy your base. When the time wave propagates, you notice your attack suddenly is failing (all your units that were made from that factory no longer exist). You go back in time and cancel the attack to keep your troops near to defend the base. Your enemy goes back in time and cancels the air unit's movement as there is no longer a need to destroy the factory.

Does your head hurt yet?

You will be glad to hear there is a limit. As you use a regenerating resource called chronoenergy to send orders to troops in the past or future. Go back too far and one order takes more than a full bar or chronoenergy. So that is the logistical limit. You have hierachies so that one order can concievebaly control 30+ units but there is a hard limit.

Want to hurt your mind more? Yes I thought so.

You have heard of teleporting. Which is in the game by the way. But what about chronoporting? This is the process of sending units forward or back in time.
Which creates deliciously complex solutions to problems....
-Oh god the base is being attacked! You only have 5 tanks and no time to make more units. Go to the chronoporter and send all the units back in time 15 seconds. Time jumps back 15sec, you now have 10 tanks. The originals and the time clones. Just make sure to protect the original 5 tanks, as they must survive the battle in order to go to the chronoproter and go back in time. Aaagh
-Send back 10 units one minute. Have them in a hierachy beforehand. Then assign them to an existing squad. You will suddenly have unprecedented firepower for that stage of the game. But you gotta weigh your options. Is it worth pouring all those resources into the early game??? Aaaagh
-Out of the three races, one can chronoport without using a structure. They do it on a unit basis. This is the most mind boggling feature in my opinion. You can actually avoid conflicting forces by chronoporting back in time a minute right before you begin your attack. If you chose the right spot then you will begin your attack before you first arrived at the base. AAAAAGH

So you need to study before this game is fun. It is not quite dwarf fortress diffuculty curve but it's up there and a clear reason why it was not as popular as other RTS games. Another thing that contributed to that is it was a bit buggy at first and the pathfinding took a lot of updates to make right.

It completely changed the way I play any other game. I sat down for a game of age of empires and after an unsuccessful raid I began looking to reverse my action and bolster my troops. I felt the mentality bleeding into my life and in an uncanny moment I snapped back into the realization that I live within time.

Any game that makes me lose sense of reality, even for a bit get the big thumbs up from me.
I'd highly reccomend this game to people who want to think and can see through complexity to do so.

Don't be fooled. This game might look interesting with its time travel mechanic, but that's precisely where the interest ends. It might be interesting if an actual good RTS used these mechanics, but instead we have this. It's as if the developpers spent all of their time working on the time travel mechanic and simply ran out of time to make the rest of the game up to par.
However, if you are interested in video game design, then I would in fact recommend this game as a learning experience. Pick it apart, see where it fails, come up with a better system to utilize the time travel mechanic, possibly.

This game shows a highly innovative, I'd even say genius mechanic of time travel in a real-time strategy - something no one has done before or since (up to 2015). In short, you can give orders to units in the past and in the future, and there are "update waves" which travel at about 3x faster than normal time. Also you can teleport units across the battlefield with teleporters and into the past/future with chronoporters. So, basically, you can do tricks by sending units into the past to help their older doubles and so on - use your imagination. This sounds like an amazing game decades ahead of its time, but sadly its poorly designed tutorial and heavily scripted missions will turn off most players and make them drop the game in frustration. I heard good things about multiplayer but you won't find anyone thru the lobby, only thru forums of this game's fans, which are in short supply.

I could endure only the demo and 3 missions, even restarted the game and played them once again to understand the mechanics better. And though I did understand how this game works with some effort, I doubt many gamers even would.

Too many units are introduced too fast. The tutorial popups ask you to do stuff but don't let you do it before you press OK which actually hides the instructions about what you need to do. The scripted events take control off from you unexpectedly, place new units and give orders to other units, creating even more confusion than the already complex time-traveling system. While the control is taken away from you, characters are talking and the battle goes on. This feels like a nuthouse. Sometimes you aren't even sure if what has just happened is a bug, a scripted event or a game mechanic in action.

I found the story trashy, though if you have nostalgic feelings for Star Wars (I don't), you may find it ok, as even the main character has the name "Luke". The 2D art is amateurish and, together with this Star Wars-like setting gives this game a "trashy" feel, like it was a school project done by teenagers - while the ingenuous combat system of this game deserved so much more. The 3D units are hard to tell from each other. The ground is covered with big uniform textures taken from some free online libraries, with strange lighting and huge, almost unit-sized bumps and long black shades in which smaller units get lost. The huge low-polygonal terrain objects look ugly next to tiny, much more detailed units. The air units hover so high above that you can't see where exactly they are located in relation to ground units (and their shades are shifted) - and where you need to bring your anti-air units so that they could fire at those air units. The controls are clumsy, the GUI is poor, with too few tips. The music is pretty good though.

The game introduces an interesting mechanic of grouping units with hierarchies of command - which also allows you to save on orders while giving orders in the past or the future (the number of orders you can give is limited by "chronoenergy"). But hierarichies don't work well, as units following a leader don't have a fixed formation, tend to spread and walk in ever expanding crowds which leads to edge units getting killed with no one helping them because the rest of the formation is out of range and won't come to assist other units in the formation.

Save files get corrupted and don't load, so if you fail (e.g. in the very first mission 8+ marines must survive in a fight which comes unexpectedly) you may have to restart the whole mission. Missions are long and heavily scripted, sometimes the instructions are given while you are busy fighting and fail to concentrate.

Voice acting is amateurish and lifeless, as if the actors were bored/annoyed with the story as much as I did. When you click on the timeline (an innovative tool to show the battlefield's states up to 5 mins ago and after), it takes the game 1-2 seconds to load the state of the battlefield at that time point which makes the whole thing feel clumsy, especially when you are already stressed by struggling with this complex game and its heavily script-influenced mission objectives.

Btw I bought the game some time in 2014 and it had all graphics glitched on my laptop (AMD Radeon HD 7670M video card), but it finally ran on my new desktop computer which has GeForce GTX 970. I think the devs need to try a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for Achron 2 and make a proper game on the same concept this time.

[table][tr][th]I'm a Steam curator, you can follow me[/th][/tr][/table]

This is the kind of game that will either be a big hit or a big miss, depending on your taste. Almost everything you do in normal rts games to win, may not grant you a win in this game. You absolutely must pay attention, keep in mind every move you can do at every point in time. Your not just playing the now, your playing the past as well, and a little of the future. One move most people don't know how to counter is when your enemy sends their entire army to the past to mess you up, the best way to counter this, is to stop your opponent from having that building. This requires heavy 4th dimensional thinking and is not for the faint of heart.

Are you looking for a strategy game which involves intense tactical action across time? If you are, then you can keep looking, because this isn't it.

Interestingly enough, the main issue with Achron is the time travel mechanics themselves. In theory it sounds about right: Use future knowledge to plan your strategy, or fix past mistakes. It worked well enough for Prince of Persia. Where could it possibly go wrong?

Time waves. That's where it first starts going horribly wrong. In theory, you should be able to jump to the past, make a few fixes, and then jump back to the present and see the results, right? Wrong. You have to wait for the "time wave" to hit, and erase the incorrect present. And how long would that take? Well, as long as you've jumped back. The time waves only move at double speed compared to normal playing. During that time, you have to play in the past, at double speed, or at least re-watch it.
You can't keep playing in the present, because as soon as the time-wave hits, many of your orders will actually be wrong for the situation, if they remain valid at all. And that's assuming that the units to whichyou need to give orders even exist in the present. You can't just wait, either, because the present doesn't stop, and by the time the time wave reaches that "future event" to which you were reacting, it is already, itself, far in the past. So, even if you only make one change, and let everything else play out without interaction, you still have to play in the past just to continue from the same spot that was previously the present. It probably wouldn't be so bad if time waves moved at 5 or 10 times the speed of normal play.

Most of the time, it's best to just play in the present, or even a bit in the future. If you need to "undo past mistakes", save games work much better than time travel. Of course, this all goes flying out the window once you have an achronal enemy. The AI seems to thrive on playing in the past. And every time the enemy makes a change, you have to go back and re-watch the whole thing, because it's enough that one of your units moved 3 inches left for most of your future commands to not work. And there's nothing more annoying than taking out the last of your enemy units, only for a time-wave to hit and suddenly your whole army is gone and you don't know why. Be prepared to watch the timeline UI VERY closely, because it's not too obvious when major changes occur. And, of course, if you notice it only when it hits the present, then it is far too late to go back and fix things, since, as said before, time waves are VERY slow.

Once you get past the idea of having to replay or at least review the same section of time over and over, you're hit with chrono-energy. In a time when most RTS players pride themselves on their click-rate, you get a game that actually tells you that the number of clicks you have is limited, and horribly so. Forget micro-managed tactics, it'd be too easy for the enemy to screw them all up by changing one tiny thing, and it would cost too much chrono-energy to undo and redo them when that happens.
It probably wouldn't be so bad if you were just limited to not making too many CHANGES to the past. But, as noted above, you are often forced to play completely in the past, unable to jump back to the present, so you're actually being limited on the number of actual practical things you can do throughout play.

But the worst part isn't in how little control you're allowed, but rather how the game tries to compensate for it. It seems like decades of RTS evolution were thrown down the drain, and instead you get a control scheme that is worse than what Dune 2 had. Since group commands cost as much chrono-energy as individual commands, you're supposed to organize units into "hierarchies", where giving orders to "the leader" gives that order to the rest of the group. As tedious as it is to arrange these heirarchies, it becomes even worse to control them. Beside having to keep track of "whose the leader", be sure that a command asking them all to move to one place will send them all scattering in all directions.
And yeah, by the way, if going up against an achronal enemy, you can be sure your leader will be targetted back in time, rendering all of your commands invalid. Sure would have been easier to spot major time waves if the "advanced timeline UI" had an indicator for "given a command to a dead unit".
The units also have individual AIs so that you won't have to give them commands to do every little thing. Too bad the AI is horrible, forcing you to waste tons of chrono-energy trying to tell your units NOT to move. Too bad there's no "stop" command. There's an "idle" command, which basically means "stop doing what I say, and go commit suicide instead". I'm not asking for Supreme Commander level of unit AI and control here, I'd just settle for my units following orders.
And all that is AFTER you've the "undo" command - the command you are going to be using the most, as you repeatedly replay the same section of events.

Once you take away the utterly broken time mechanics, what you're left with is a rather poorly balanced strategy game, with really poor controls. There are a few units which are clearly more powerful than anything else, and they aren't significantly more expensive to create. In fact, some of them are actually cheaper than other units. A group of 5 octoligos or twin MARs can take out most anything. Except for an army of MCBs or black birds. Units with self-repair tend to have the most broken balance, as they are neigh-invincible, so long as you can convince them not to move too far from each other (See: Horrible controls). I guess that's the reason only the humans have them. I spent most of chapter 3 just making sure the one MCB I had was free to join the fight, since it was usually a game-breaker. Oddly enough, I got an achievement for it, even though it was the most obvious thing to do.
If you're thinking of creating mixed armies of aerial and ground units with anti-air and anti-ground, you can forget it. It would require too much micro-management to use these properly, and that, as noted before, gets screwed over fast, thanks to the time mechanics. You'd think the per-unit AI, given that it's probably intended to reduce the need for micro-management, would do something useful, like targetting aerial units with anti-air and ground units with anti-ground, but it seems to more often do the exact opposite. Fact is, it's better to just have a large enough all-purpose army, which can simply be told to go from point A to point B and destroy everything in its path. That tactic works WAY better than it should. Probably because, no matter how many times the enemy replays the battle with the overly large army, there is nothing it can do to prevent the resulting annihilation.

The main counter-measure the game offers to the "large enough army of all the same unit" is limited resources. And most maps sure do limit resources. Of course, there's nothing like using every last resource to build a huge army, destroying all of the enemy's units, and then getting a surprise mission to "build this and that" with resources you no longer have.

So, having covered how bad the game is all on its own, let's get started on the bugs. And this game sure is rife with them.

Let's start with the simplest one: Windowed mode does not work. I mean, it works, but the graphics are scaled based on the total window size, including the title. This makes the top of the screen be cut off. Too bad that's exactly where your resources are shown. The thing is, this should have been the first thing that should have shown up on even the simplest QA. It's like no one even tested if the game manages to go to windowed mode.

There's more I'd like to say, but it seems I'm out of room in this review (Why is this limited?). Suffice to say, there are worse bugs, but not enough space left. You have been warned.

Achron is a very interesting concept for a strategy game. If you like seeing entirely new mechanics for games, Achron is definitely something to pick up. However, obvious pitfalls make this game incredibly...tiresome.

The Good:
The time mechanics in the game are interesting, and mostly intuitive. Travelling throughout a 7 minute time period (5-6 minutes behind, 1-2 minutes ahead), you can see things that have happened, and can actually change the events that have happened. If you have problems with understanding, "What happened with that group?" you can just rewind to see why that occurred. The interface is also intuitive enough so you can understand when some things happen. Movement, orders, and normal actions doesn't deviate from the norm in top-down strategy games, so a player that plays other top-down strategy (Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer, etc.) will not see any kind of problems getting into this game.

The Bad:
The interface needs some serious tweaks to understand your actions, and what your actions in the timeline are affecting. Its also extremely hard to tell when your changes are getting propagated to the present when it has nothing to do with unit on unit combat. If you (or another time traveller) jumps back to the past, makes a change, and you (in the future), could see a change that doesn't exactly make sense (such as a building or unit not getting built). While you do have the ability to jump into the past and see the changes why, the user interface incredibly lacks when, why and how things are getting modified.

Pathing in this game is also a joke. Most games, you can just right-click the location and they will path around obstacles. However, in Achron, if you right click on the right side of the map, and in the center is a one-entrance gully, which they have to go to the North or South to avoid, they will enter the gully, and get stuck on the eastern edge of the gully and stop, without trying to repath. Also, groups have hard times keeping together, since formations do not exist. Friendly "nudging" to get out of the way of a building being built, or a tank trying to get through a line of friendly soldiers, does not exist. Even with this garbage pathing, one unit can only have five orders active at one time.

The unit creation queues are also a joke. You can manage it once its in the queue effectively, and the queue is hard to understand, with health bars on the queue for some odd reason. Its hard to tell if something is made for a purpose or not, and the creation of buildings with the wrong unit mentions "at a higher cost," but fails to tell you how much it costs. Also, if you place down one building, that area is not "reserved" for other friendly units to not build buildings on that spot, so you'll run into the issue that you might build where a building is going to go.

The fact that you can't stop Major characters from moving to repair/help build unless they are leagues away annoys me considerably. I can't count the times in which the main characters (that aren't supposed to die) broke formation to heal a front-line unit, and ended up getting killed, requiring me to go back in time to tell them run away.

Teleporters are also really terrible. Rather than teleporting units as close as possible to the specified point, they are teleported anywhere within a 20 block radius from the chosen point, creating problems that units end up on top of impassible terrain, or in the middle of canyons, unable to get out, even with a nearby teleporter.

The game also takes control too early for major objectives, using the simulated "future time" (1-2 minutes in the future) to determine when an objective is finished. Because of this, it causes major characters to die because the computer takes control of the characters and moves them out of formation, requiring you to go back in time to rectify it after the unskippable cutscene ends. Also, unskippable cutscenes (which doesn't pause the game while doing it) in game.

The Ugly:
Its evident that they worked on the time-manipulation system for 90% of the time. Maps are built incorrectly; they have impassible 85 degree inclines with textures that resemble a rock formation rather than walls that are textured properly. The large walls, which are blended together with the floor patterns, make the inside of ships and buildings look like outside with just really steep walls.

Voice acting and story, I would say that its really dumb. Okay, that's being generous, the storyline is probably one of the weakest things in the game. Game introduces Tyr, an AI, but people talk to it like a person when it comes out, makes it confusing when Tyr is introduced as an AI later on. When you encounter another AI later on, everyone treats that same type of AI as the enemy, despite Tyr being that same type of AI. Events in the game occur in reasonable order, instead things happen that suit what the storyline needs at that point in time. Even when a chapter switches, which makes you go to another race and control it (ala Starcraft), is disjointed, problematic, anti-climactic and dumb. Character moods are inconsistent, and flat. Voice acting is lifeless, and I find myself skipping cutscenes just so I don't have to listen to characters that I don't care about drone on and on, making me more sleepy than when Ben Stein is talking.

Overall:
Achron is a great and new game element into a game that would be great as a concept game, but fails to excite with lackluster AI, UI, Storyline and Voice Acting. 3/10.

Time Travel is usable. Ever since Command and Conquer: Red Alert I've wanted that.

I still haven't got my head around the relationship between Time and Metatime in relation to the game, but that hasn't hindered my enjoyment.

Do recommend.

Time travel RTS. Do I need to say more?
The RTS part is not the strongest. Frankly: without the time travel, it would be a rather lame game, I suppose. Lots of units without a real point. basic list of buildings and very basic economy. The engine is Warzone, so raaather old. But the time travel is real time travel! You can change events, which already happened, send units back and forth in time and your opponent will do so, too! The time travel is so well thought through, that there won't be any 'paradoxon' and even though you have the power to time travel, there will be an end to any conflict. But prepare for headaches!

This is a very original RTS, the time travel mechanic is very well done and fun to use, but the game could use more polish and there are a few bugs.