There were a lot of awesome indie games that came out of this year’s Independent Games Festival; you might have heard of Everyday Shooter and Castle Crashers? One such game whose title caught my eye in the student showcase is Euclidean Crisis.

Euclidean Crisis is an RTS designed by students at Stanford University that is controlled entirely with a touch screen and voice commands. For those who don’t have a Tablet PC the mouse can be substituted for the touch screen stylus, and the HUD provides alternatives to the voice commands for those who don’t have a microphone. Euclidean Crisis is freeware, and can be downloaded here. The system specs are quite low; as long as you have 512mb of RAM and a graphics card you should be fine (my computer was able to run it just fine despite integrated graphics cards not being supported). Starting a single-player game can be somewhat confusing because there are several executables, although there is help provided on their website. Run CrisisMaster.exe and then Client.exe and you should be fine.



Euclidean Crisis is very simple for an RTS, and while it probably won’t appeal to hardcore RTS players, for those of us who don’t play RTSes regularly it is difficult enough for us to stay interested without being intimidated. Unlike most RTSes there is no resource gathering in Euclidean Crisis; instead your energy core’s rate of unit production is based on how many control points you have secured. There are five types of units you can build, each (except the Tesla Coil) with their own special abilities. Your energy core will produce them at different rates depending on how powerful they are (fighters take less time to produce than warships for example). You win the game if you destroy the other players’ energy cores.

There are a variety of ways to select and command your units. To select a single unit you can simply click on it. To select group of units you can draw a circle around the units you want. Unit groups can be assigned names so that you can select and focus on them more quickly; this is done using voice commands or the HUD. To move units you must draw a flight path with your mouse or stylus; these flight paths can simply bring the units to a destination or if the flight path loops the units will patrol that path. The flight paths can also be appended later by continuing the line from the end point. Unit groups can also move in a variety of formations, which can be set by voice commands or the HUD.

The AI in Euclidean Crisis is fairly simplistic and even someone new to RTSes should find it fairly easy to defeat them. They seem to become more difficult depending on how many other players there are in a game. For those who are looking for more of a challenge I recommend playing the Death Flower map, which allows you to play against 7 other AI and makes for an epic battle with the final opponent.

In conclusion, Euclidean Crisis is a fun little RTS that should keep you entertained for an hour or two (probably a lot longer if you can find someone else to play with), and since it’s free, small and will run on just about any system there’s no reason for you not to try it. It’s unfortunate that the students are no longer working on it because it has great potential. I would especially like to see a version made for the DS.