Riot Civil Unrest

Geoffrey Wright | October 6, 2015 | Preview | No Comments

During EGX I managed to get my hands on the first public demo of Riot Civil Unrest.
For those not aware, Riot Civil Unrest is a real-time strategy game that lets you experience real life riots from around the globe from the side of the police for controlling the riot and the crowd causing the riot.

It is an easy game to control. You select your unit and command them to move or take action in a specific spot on the stage. That is all you do but if you are not paying full attention to the current situation you could easily find yourself in a rather sticky situation.
The goal for the campaign as the police is to push the rioters back whereas if you play as the rioters your goal is to occupy a space for a set amount of time or by completely pushing the police back – which ever comes first.

I was introduced to different world stages and the most impressive feature of Riot is how well the AI have been programmed. Not just how they interact with you during the riot but how all the characters differ from country to country. With out getting too political, we all know that police forces around the world will act differently and in turn, the rioters will retaliate differently too. This was very apparent in the different stages I played as certain police forces were easily intimidated by the rioters whereas another country’s police force were rather heavy-handed with the rioters.

There will be a lot more AI functions in the full game and I was shown a couple in the demo. One is where the rioters become a lot more agitated thus causing them to be more erratic and making them attack the police more often. As the police you have two choice in how you deal with the situation; you can either go in calm and just push them back with force (ie Roman army march with your riot shields) or go in meaning to do damage by using your smoke grenades or batons. However though, if you do go in heavy handing expect the rioters to come back at you with equal amount of force. I was explained that there is another way to bring the rioters to a halt and this is by pin pointing the “leader” of the riot and arresting them before they rally up the crowd even more. It is not always apparent who this is from the start but as the riot goes on for a while, the leader will start to stand out.

All in all, Riot Civil Unrest is looking like a very unique experience. The riots that take place in the campaign are based on real locations and real riots. There has been a lot of research done for this game to make it the ultimate riot simulator. It may not suit everyone as it is presented in a pixel perfect world but for me this style (especially in the cut scenes) as a gritty feel to the game and adds to the whole experience.

Riot Civil Unrest is staying on my radar and if anyone enjoys real-time strategy games then it should be on your list too.