Be an alien terror on the battlefield in FPS-strategy hybrid Silica
As I scuttle across the sandy battlefield of Silica and pounce upon two unsuspecting enemy marines, tearing them apart, I can’t help but grin. Silica is still very much a work in progress, but there’s something here that awakens that deep-rooted Aliens vs Predator feeling in my brain. Our early playtest of this shooter-strategy hybrid focuses on the FPS game side, and my immediate takeaways are the sheer scale and the frantic nature of combat.
Ahead of Silica’s first developer livestream, PCGamesN got the chance to try the game at a press playtest with its solo developer Martin ‘Dram’ Melichárek. We’re set up in a three-way battle with two human teams and one taking the reins of the alien race. At any point, one player on each team can hop into the management hotseat, which functions much like a traditional top-down RTS game with resource gathering and base building that feels very reminiscent of classic Command and Conquer.
When you’re just a tiny unit in the FPS mode, this means the scale of the vehicles and buildings around you is immense and daunting. Zooming right in from the tactical mode will show everything playing out in real time, but actually putting boots on the ground is something else. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to travel around the map faster – humans can teleport to areas within line of sight, or hop in a vehicle, while alien players can hotswap into the body of any other alien in view that isn’t currently player-controlled.
Other such games have attempted this genre blend before, with the likes of Natural Selection 2 and BattleZone II standing out as some of the highlights. Silica, however, employs a full physics model with realistic ballistics that lets characters stand on vehicles, will see
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