There have been many attempts to reboot the RTS recently, ranging from throwbacks like the recent Age Of Mythology: Retold to splicey novelties such as Battle Aces. I’m not sure any have managed it, but I’m always glad to see fresh blood spilled in the house of Westwood. Which brings us to Project Citadel, a new space-me-do from Last Keep, a studio founded by former staff of Stranger Things devs BonusXP and Age Of Empires outfit Ensemble. It pitches you against an alien empire, and blends squad mechanics redolent of Halo Wars with a roguelike format that aims to support shorter play sessions, while still supposedly allowing for vintage strategy gambits like booming and rushing.
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You don’t know what “booming” is? Goodness, you sound just like me before I wrote this news post: turns out it’s something I’ve been doing for years without realising. For clarity, “booming” is when you focus on building up your economy at the start of a traditional RTS match. “Rushing” is obviously when you commit to an early offensive with cheapo units. Project Citadel aims to make these approaches work across a procedurally generated, turn-based campaign, with players moving across a branching, galactic overmap of smaller RTS encounters. The construction element is supplied by your mothership, which can assemble starbases and also provide support in battle.
The missing third pillar here is “turtling”, which is when you throw up as many defences as possible to begin with, hoping that your opponent will rush you and splatter themselves all over your turrets (a boomer player, by contrast, will simply gain a headstart in production while you’re wasting time prepping for an attack that never comes). Project Citadel doesn’t do turtling, it seems, because you’re always on the assault, forever trying to bring down that dang Voltari empire.
For ex-Microsoft and Battlefy exec Yohan Sengamalay and his collaborators, who include former Ensemble devs David Pottinger and Jason Sallenbach, bringing in roguelike elements is all about “deconstructing” the strategy genre. “We’ve taken the traditional, lengthy campaign and broken it into shorter missions that fit a roguelike structure,” Sengamalay told me over email. “This maintains meaningful choices and depth while introducing quicker rewards and greater experimentation.”
As for unit control, “the moment-to-moment combat retains some similarity with strategy games we’ve worked on, but with added combat movement and skill-shot abilities to emphasize timing,” Sengamalay went on. “You command squadrons rather than individual units, an expansion of what we started with Halo Wars, allowing us to make the game equally playable on both controllers and mouse/keyboard setups.” The ships themselves range from missile-vomming daggers to hard-wearing behemoths. Their “skill-shots” include ramming through opposing formations like a herd of buffalo.
As for how Project Citadel stands apart from other attempts to jump-start a new era in StarCraft & Conquering, Sengamalay observed to me that “while the genre is experiencing a resurgence, it is very much centered around remakes or spiritual successors”. Last Keep are a titchy indie, numbering just 2-10 people according to their LinkedIn. According to Sengamalay, they’re “neither interested nor have the resources to simply re-make past successes like Age of Empires”.
The pessimistic take on all this is that people have been cobbling roguelike exoskeletons onto other species of game for decades – I moaned about the abundance of roguelike deckbuilders on these very pages not two weeks ago. Sometimes, the combination is a symbiosis, and sometimes it’s parasitism: the repetitiveness of rogueliking overpowers other aspects of the experience.
The cynical read is that I’ve heard a pitch like this before. While at BonusXP – which closed in June 2023 for reasons not given at the time, amid widespread games industry cuts – Pottinger and Sallenbach worked on Servo, an RTS that sought similarly to spice things up with RPG elements, and was also touted as being from former Age Of Empires developers. Released in early access in 2015, it won praise initially but never made it to 1.0.
All that notwithstanding, I’m always interested in attempts to “deconstruct” an established format. As an elder Age Of Mythology player who carries a candle for Halo Wars, I hope that Project Citadel fares better than Servo. You can read more about the game on Steam. There’s no release date yet.
