What’s the largest match you’ve ever played in an RTS? 4v4 battles can be pretty big. 16 or even 32 players are pushing into the realm of the absurd. But how about 110 players trading artillery fire and nuclear missiles? That’s just unreasonable, and a fitting showcase for Beyond All Reason, an increasingly popular free indie RTS inspired by mega-scale mech war classics Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. If you want to see a truly absurd number of robots exploding, you’ve come to the right place.
Normally, matches aren’t allowed to get this big in the game (mostly due to anything but a seriously high-end gaming rig buckling under the strain), but the developers behind this community passion project decided to celebrate their community Discord hitting 40,000 users by going large, and hosting a series of mega-scale battles last month, with a theoretical limit of 160 player matches with over 15,000 units shared between them.
Amazingly, everything worked. Players with older PCs had to enjoy the fireworks slideshow-style, but the game’s robust netcode handled the strain surprisingly well. While you can watch the entire 24-hour showcase stream on the game’s official Twitch channel, RTS streamer and YouTuber WinterGamingTV has been commentating some of the biggest matches held. You can now behold some of the biggest battles held in the history of the genre, starting with the island-hopping 110 player match below. The match features some absolutely chaotic naval scrums as five teams of 22 players collided across an all-too-claustrophobic sea.
But probably the most impressive match was this 80-player, four-way land and air battle, which hit peaks of over ten thousand active units as players clawed their way across a hotly contested crater, trying to deal a decisive blow against each other’s delicate and explosive reactor complexes. In the final phases of the conflict, enormous waves of nukes were lobbed across the map by the red team, enough to overwhelm both the anti-missile defences and base shields of their rivals and opening up the path to their eventual victory. But until those final stages, the match could have gone to any of the teams.
Even when played by a normal number of players, Beyond All Reason is still a frequently spectacular game, whether you’re online or off. You’ll probably not be hitting five-digit unit counts, but battles escalate into the thousands faster than you’d expect. At present, the game mostly mimics Total Annihilation’s unit set (with some extra inspiration from Supreme Commander), with BAR’s Armada and Cortex factions cheekily standing in for TA’s Arm and Core robot armies, but there’s a third playable side—Legion—currently in testing.
Beyond its TA inspiration, the game also has a pair of PvE-only ‘horde’ factions; Raptors (robot-eating alien dinosaurs) and Scavengers (a self-replicating junkbot swarm), which make for some fun defensive survival battles in solo or co-op. And even against regular bots, the AI is no slouch. The only thing the game really lacks at this point is a full solo campaign, which is planned, but in the meantime you can play a handful of one-shot scenario missions to learn the ropes.
Beyond All Reason is free and available now direct from the developer’s site, with a major update rolling out just this week. There’s a Steam release planned once they’ve ticked a few more boxes off their final launch checklist and finished up the game’s planned solo campaigns. For those wanting something similar and with a more single-player focus on Steam, check out the excellent Zero-K. It’s also free, still expanding and shares similar roots.
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