Clicking a random link this morning, I was dazzled by the glare of a thousand laser batteries firing simultaneously. My ears trembled beneath the trundle of a million caterpillar tracks. Balls of ice, bolts of lightning, shipments of rare alloys, and cascades of drop pods went screaming down my nerves and detonated in my frontal cortex, painting starlanes across the inside of my skull. “Oh god, they’ve finally found us!” I yelled, hiding beneath my desk. “I for one welcome our new galactic overlords!”
But then I realised that I wasn’t looking at a live newsfeed, but merely the Steam page for Horu, a real-time 4X strategy game in which you can “command hundreds of thousands of units across land and space”, in the summary of developer David “GlassBeaver” Nadaski. There’s also a magic system, this being “the spice that makes your enemy’s defeat bitter”, which is a very genteel way to characterise glaciating a tank formation or conjuring a miniature blackhole.
