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Perimeter is a 3D real time strategy game from Codemasters and KD labs, that gives the player a choice of three different factions from which to lead their chosen people to a new home world free of the alien menace known as the scourge.

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Perimeter is set to be a groundbreaking strategy game, which intends to bring lots of fresh new ideas to the genre. The story for Perimeter is set in a universe where the Earth has been abandoned and three different civilisations are in a race across a newly discovered galaxy to colonise the only suitable planet. This epic journey will involve exploring many new worlds, battling against other civilizations and indigenous species and outrunning the scourge, all to acquire energy to continue the search for a new home.

The scourge themselves are hostile alien creatures that emanate from their lairs coming in a variety of forms, ranging from insect like monsters to giant dragons that fly and burrow underground breathing fire on your factions units and buildings, generally wreaking havoc wherever they go.

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All of this is played out in brilliant full 3D environments with an intuitive camera which can be adjusted at will to best scope out potential strategies and to admire enthralling fights that can take place between thousand of troops or just sit back and admire the beautiful scenery. To go with the graphical brilliance of Perimeter, there is also an interesting musical score which suites the futuristic sci-fi theme quite well.

The intricate functions of perimeter are easily controlled, all with clicks from mouse or the pressing of a simple hotkey, from changing and panning the camera angle, creating a building que of 500 soldiers to morphing entire squadrons into different units in the heat of battle. What will potentially set Perimeter apart from different games of the real time strategy genre though, are a strong adaptive AI, unique unit creation and base building aspects.

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From what I have had the fortune of seeing, the AI is remarkably adaptive to the players strategy, it is both cunning and aggressive and will use tactics such as pincer movements, flank attacks and it will test your base defences before sending in its own armies to annihilate your faction.

Unit creation is also unique, in fact that you only have a limited number of squads to fill with several 'base' unit types, these being the basic solider, officer and technician from which with the necessary technology you can morph to specific squad to create faster, stronger and better fighting machines. And later on you can decide to undo this morphing process to adapt to a tactical situation and change the squad into an entirely different set of units. For example, I could have a mixture of soldiers, technicians and officers and decide to morph them into snipers to attack enemy infantry, but if there are vehicles Ill be needing something with a bit more firepower, and so I can morph the sniper squadron back into the normal base troops, then into powerful rocket launching vehicles, ideal for the situation at hand and all that with a simple click of the mouse button.

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Base building is also done slightly differently in Perimeter when compared to other real time strategy games. You start of with your headquarters, a giant floating space ship which houses your factions leaders and citizens and instead of building structures dependant on resources, in Perimeter you have to designate areas to be terraformed into suitable locations for your structures by 'painting' an area for your nano-bots to transform into a solid smooth metal foundation. The only resource in Perimeter is energy, as long as you have energy being generated you can keep building units, and when it all gets too tough you can switch on the impregnable Perimeter defence force shield that can stop all attacks, however due to a immense energy drain this will only be a temporary solution to base defence. Interestingly base building has to be done very carefully as every structure is powered by energy generators, and if one of these gets captured you can find that a large proportion of your base is in enemy hands!

On top of all this there are 27 missions, 28 morph-able units, 24 structure types, 30 single player maps for skirmish mode, an original music score and you can also experience 2-4 multiplayer over LAN and the Internet. Perimeter is scheduled for release 21st May 2004 and will require at least a 1ghz processor, 256MB RAM and a 64MB graphics card.

If you are intrigued by Perimeter from reading this, I would recommend trying the demo that has been released and is downloadable here on Strategy Informer, the demo itself features 2 civilizations to try, a tutorial mission and a skirmish mode with 2 different maps.