A YEAR OF RAIN Early Access Impressions

Copy cats are very interesting. We see many games that take from classics and huge successes and make almost exact duplicates. Whether it is mechanics, style or stories, making copies of other games happens pretty often, below every great game is a few games that are almost exactly the same with a slightly lower quality.

All this said, A Year of Rain does copy most things from popular games like the Warcraft and Starcraft series, but with some layers of unique personality. To be blunt, A Year of Rain feels and plays exactly like just about every other RTS out there and almost shamelessly copies the mechanics and hero systems from Warcraft III. There are three races to choose from with three heroes in each race and a good variety between the humans, undead, and nature-loving peoples. The units in all three groups are unique enough to let players enjoy certain play styles and design styles. Overall, if you enjoy and have played any other RTS from Blizzard, you’ll know exactly how to play the game, you’d just have to know what units and heroes do which things.

What separates this game a little bit more is the cinematic storytelling in stories campaign. Yes, players will do lots of walking around, releasing captured allies and building armies to smash opponents, but the cutscenes (using in-game models) are fairly impressive and show a lot of effort and energy.

Another huge thing that will make this game very different than others, and justify its existence, is a new game mode called Against All Odds. This is a new 2v2 game where one team is made of normal armies that build units and collect resources, while the other team is made of only two heroes. These heroes will beef up a lot and learn a bunch of skills and powers to attack the enemy and face an entire army. This mode is very interesting and a big selling point, but it is not available at the moment with no release window as of now, which is a bummer, to say the least.

Technically, the game looks pretty good and is fairly smooth, if you have a pretty good machine. If you are running on a normal PC or older gaming PC of sorts, you’ll find some hiccups while matching up and some significant slowdown and frame rate drop when the battles get big. Overall, it looks and plays well, just don’t be surprised if things get a little “janky” when there are more than 30-40 units on screen.

A Year of Rain can’t help but be compared to its other competitors and their legacy/production. It does its job just fine and will keep the players entertained for a good while, but it is unfortunate and somewhat odd that a large piece of the games selling point, Against All Odds, is missing upon this early access release.