Release Dated: The Grey Goo Petroglyph Do

As end-of-human-civilization scenarios go, I quite like the sound of grey goo. Yes, self-replicating nanomachines converting everything into more of themselves will become a real problem at some point, but think of the fun we can have in those first few minutes and hours, playfully feeding items into nanomachine puddles and - carefully - flinging around spadefuls of fizzing sludge.

That's not quite the premise of Petroglyph's game Grey Goo. We haven't really had a gander at the RTS since they announced it in March but now that Petroglyph have announced a release date - January 23rd, 2015, calendar compulsives - let's have a look-see.

So... we won't be carefully feeding sticks into grey goo and marvelling at how they seem to vanish into the puddle. Sadly it's set on an alien planet rather than our own Earth consumed by goo. What we will be doing is building bases, harvesting resources, raising armies, and blowing up other things wot are doing the same. That's sorta Petroglyph's deal, going all the way back to when its founders worked on Command & Conquer at Westwood. They're had a run of bum games, though, leaving a trail of closed free-to-play games, a cancelled Kickstarter, and End of Nations vanished.

But enough history. Grey Goo is a plain old pay-once retail game, which I'd say is better suited to RTSs than trying to bend them into F2P. As for what's different about it, it's pretty big on base-building as you can see in these eighty minutes of livestreamed matches from a recent beta build: